The Image (40 page)

An important book could be written on the press secretary and his role in politics and American public life. The most suggestive treatments I have come upon are Lela Stiles,
The Man Behind Roosevelt: The Story of Louis McHenry Howe
(1954); and miscellaneous items in current magazines, like the cover story on James C. Hagerty, President Eisenhower’s secretary, in
Time
, LXXI (Jan. 27, 1958), 16–20; the article on Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy’s press secretary in
Time
, LXXVI (Dec. 5, 1960), p. 57. Patrick D. Hazard of the Annenberg School of Communications has kindly let me see his unpublished paper, “The Entertainer as Hero: The Burden of an Anti-Intellectual Tradition,” which I have found invaluable.

For the facts from which I reconstruct my account of the transformation of Lindbergh from hero into celebrity I have leaned heavily on Kenneth S. Davis,
The Hero: Charles A. Lindbergh and the American Dream
(1959). This meticulous book combines the vividness and warmth of a good novel with a relentless objectivity. It is brilliant evidence that the techniques of the sociologist do not require the abandonment of the humanist’s literary elegance or dramatic flair. Davis gives us a parable for our time, which no serious student of American morals in the twentieth century should fail to read. Similar studies, with comparable insight, sympathy, and objectivity, of figures like Al Capone, Rudolph Valentino, Charlie Chaplin, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley, would teach us more about ourselves than many of the more lengthy studies of less significant but more conventionally “important” minor figures in our political, literary, and academic life. Some suggestive notions and much valuable detail, especially on popular attitudes to figures like Capone, are found in Orrin E. Klapp, “Hero-Worship in America,”
American Sociological Review
, XIV (Feb., 1949), 53–62, and in a longer version of the same study, “The Hero as a Social Type” (1948), unpublished doctoral
dissertation in the Department of Sociology of the University of Chicago. A constantly useful tool for exploring the uncompiled social history of our time is
The New York Times Index
.

George Waller’s copiously detailed
Kidnap: The Story of the Lindbergh Case
(1961) appeared as this volume was going to press.

Just as a large proportion of our great literature has been the chronicle of heroes, so, much of it has been a chronicle of travel. Many great epics have been both at the same time. In fact, if one defined an epic as the adventures of a hero who travels, one would exclude few of enduring importance. This itself may be evidence to support the theses of my
Chapters 2
and
3
. The story of a hero on his travels—Ulysses against Polyphemus—can excite the minstrel talents of great poets; but a celebrity at his relaxation (that is, on vacation)—Bob Hope in Palm Springs—can inspire few but gossip columnists. The decline of the hero and the decline of travel have come together. Except for religion and war, travel was for centuries the most hero-producing, hero-inciting of man’s activities. In religion many epic heroes (the Buddha, Moses, Mohammed) have been notable travelers.

The literature of travel is so abundant (even for the United States alone) that one hardly knows where to begin. It comprises some of the most readable, most exciting, and most neglected of Americana. We may divide the American travel literature into three large classes which overlap both logically and chronologically: (1) travel epics; (2) travel surveys; and, (3) travel reactions (or tourist diaries).

First is the travel epic, whose central figure is a hero doing great deeds, encountering risks, exploring and enjoying the exotic and the dangerous. It includes some of the basic sources of American history: for example, such works as those by Captain John Smith,
True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Note as hath hapned in Virginia since the first planting of that Colony
(1608),
True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captain John Smith in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, from … 1593 to 1629
(1630). The Pocahontas story, a characteristic travel exploit, is recounted in detail by Smith himself in his
General Historie of Virginia …
(1624). William Bradford’s
History of Plymouth Plantation
is in
large part a travel epic. This first group also includes such later American classics as the
History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark
(ed. Nicholas Biddle and Paul Allen, 2 vols., 1814); John Lloyd Stephens,
Incidents of Travel in Central America
(1841) and
Incidents of Travel in Yucatan
(1843); Francis Parkman,
Oregon Trail
(1849); Josiah Gregg,
Commerce of the Prairies
(2 vols., 1844); Mark Twain,
Roughing It
(1872),
A Tramp Abroad
(1880), and
Life on the Mississippi
(1883); and Charles Warren Stoddard,
South-Sea Idyls
(1873),
The Lepers of Molokai
(1885),
Hawaiian Life
(1894), and
The Island of Tranquil Delights
(1904), which, like many of the pseudo-classics of day-before-yesterday, become the staple of secondhand furniture stores.

Books of the second class, the travel surveys, sometimes overlap with those of the first. They offer us fewer accounts of derring-do, of exciting action, and risky encounter, and are primarily compilations of outlandish or useful information. Much of the writing by Europeans about America in the colonial period had this character. Such works were in demand because of the helpful information (or interesting misinformation) they offered about the New World. The rise of natural history in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries produced such works as
Observations on the Inhabitants, Climate, Soil, etc.… made by John Bartram in his travels from Pensilvania to … Lake Ontario
(1751), and by his son William Bartram,
Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, etc
. (1791); Thomas Jefferson,
Notes on the State of Virginia
(1784); John James Audubon,
Birds of America
(1827–1838), and his journals, selected as
Delineations of American Scenery and Character
(1926). For an excellent selection of writings by Americans about their experiences abroad (most of which take the form of social survey or encounters with famous men and women), see Philip Rahv (ed.),
Discovery of Europe
(Anchor paperback, 1960).

The rise of the social sciences further encouraged such collection and classification of information from faraway places. Examples of such works are: again, Thomas Jefferson,
Notes on the State of Virginia
(1784), which was prepared expressly for a European reader, the Marquis de Barbois, secretary of the French legation in Philadelphia, whose twenty-odd Baedeker-like questions formed the frame of the book; Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America
(2 vols., 1835; first American edition, 1838), which grew out of a stay of less than a year (May, 1831–Feb., 1832) in the United States; and George
Catlin, whose illustrated
Manners and Customs of the North American Indians
(2 vols., 1841) was the product of eight years of travels and observations from the Yellowstone to Florida. Some of the most delightful books to come out of eighteenth-century America are the too-little-read travel surveys by William Byrd, who retails facts and fictions of natural history, geography, and social customs with a rare wit. His works include
History of the Dividing Line
(1728),
Progress to the Mines
(1732), and
Journey to the Land of Eden
(1733), all of which were first published only in 1841.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the approaching conflict between North and South incited an additional large number of remarkable social-survey travel volumes. Important examples are the influential books by Frederick Law Olmsted:
A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States
(1856),
A Journey Through Texas
(1857), and
A Journey in the Back Country
, abridged and revised as
The Cotton Kingdom
(2 vols., 1861; ed. by Arthur M. Schlesinger, 1953). Admirable analytical bibliographies are Thomas D. Clark,
Travels in the Old South
(3 vols., 1956–1959) and E. Merton Coulter,
Travels in the Confederate States
(1948). Many of the best travel surveys of the American West are collected by Reuben G. Thwaites in his multivolumed
Early Western Travels
, 1748–1846 (32 vols., 1904–1907).

Compared to either of these earlier classes, both of which continue to be exemplified in many excellent works, the third, and distinctively modern, class, the book of travel reactions (or tourist diary), is pretty flimsy stuff. Characteristically, instead of recording action, recounting mortal risks, or surveying the social scene and interesting customs, it records the confusion, amused bewilderment, and disorientation of the tourist himself, or his frustrated search for adventure. The focus is on a puzzled, self-conscious quest for the “interesting,” rather than on inevitable encounters. An example is Tats Blain,
Mother-Sir!
(1951), “a navy wife’s hilarious hap-hazardous adventures in Japan.” A more substantial work is Herbert Kubly,
American in Italy
(1955), which, precisely because it is deftly written and expertly constructed, reveals the limits of this kind of travel literature.

We need some good histories of travel as an institution. Paul Hazard,
The European Mind, 1680–1715
(1953) is the book I know which best puts old-style travel in the large framework of thought, belief, and feelings. Seymour Dunbar’s copious
History of Travel in America
(1915; 1937) is valuable mainly as a readable chronicle of the forms of transportation, on which it
gathers a large stock of unassimilated information. For a special study of the varying motives which have taken Americans to one part of the world, see Van Wyck Brooks,
The Dream of Arcadia: American Writers and Artists in Italy, 1760–1915
(1958). For some of the philosophical and epistemological implications of the means of travel in different epochs, see Harold A. Innis’ profound and remarkable brief books,
Empire and Communications
(1950) and
Changing Concepts of Time
(1952). I have raised some questions about the relations between travel styles and styles in sight-seeing in “An American Style in Historical Monuments,” in my
America and the Image of Europe
(1960), pp. 79–96.

The literature on the history of tourism is, for the most part, even more rudimentary. F. W. Ogilvie,
The Tourist Movement: An Economic Study
(1933) is written mainly from the British point of view, and focuses on statistics and currency effects. A broader view is taken by A. J. Norval,
The Tourist Industry
(1936), a study originally undertaken under the auspices of the government of the Union of South Africa. Neither of these books, nor any other book I know, explores the many implications of the rise of the package tour, the tour agent, and middle-class touring, for standard of living and social attitudes in general. An essay on the history of travelers’ checks and credit cards could be quite suggestive. The rise of conventions (commercial, professional, etc.) in the United States—a subject with wide implications—still needs treatment. An excellent regional study showing the many-sided possibilities of the history of tourism for social history in general is Earl Pomeroy,
In Search of the Golden West: The Tourist in Western America
(1957).

Government statistics, and reports of committees to promote tourism, are a valuable source. Here again I have found indispensable
Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957
(Statistical Abstract Supplement; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census; Government Printing Office, 1960), especially the figures on consumer expenditure, transportation, and distribution and services (for example, on hotels and motels). Miscellaneous facts can be found in such reports as: League of Nations (Economic Committee),
Survey of Tourist Traffic considered as An International Economic Factor
(Geneva, 1936); U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign Commerce,
Survey of International Travel
(Washington, D.C., 1956) and
United States Participation in International Travel, 1959 Supplement
(Washington, D.C., 1959); Clarence B.
Randall,
International Travel: Report to the President of the United States
(Washington, D.C., April 17, 1958).

An oblique approach to the subject is found in the history of the formalities of foreign travel, and especially in the history of the passport. On this topic, however, much of the printed matter now concerns either the bare Government regulations and formalities, or questions of public administration and political theory, such as how to administer the issuance of passports, whether restrictions on issuance are an infringement of the right of movement or of expatriation, etc. Current passport regulations, and especially the impressive easing and speeding of procedures for securing passports (in 1961, citizens in Chicago were receiving their passports in three days), evidence the changed character of foreign travel. Some historical perspective can be secured by a glance at documents from the turn of the century, for example, United States Department of State,
Passport Regulations of Foreign Countries
(Washington, 1897) and
The American Passport
(Washington, 1898). See Theodore M. Norton, “The Right to Leave the United States,” unpublished doctoral dissertation in the Department of Political Science, University of Chicago (1960).

The history of particular tour agencies can be approached through John Pudney,
The Thomas Cook Story
(1953), a vivid and literate essay, showing imagination, a sense of humor, and an even-handed impartiality; and its contrasting counterpart Alden Hatch,
American Express: A Century of Service
(1950), a much thinner book, naive in its social history, with all the provincialisms and synthetic enthusiasms of “authorized” company history. On American Express see also: Ralph T. Reed, “American Express: Its Origin and Growth,” in Publications of The Newcomen Society, Vol. 15 (1952); and “Uncle to the Tourists,”
Fortune
, LXIII (June, 1961), 140–149.