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Copyright (c) 2004 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.

Introduction
Consumerism, the Cold War, and Globalization

The lobby of the Hôtel George V in Paris has been a good place to observe the rise and fall of great powers in the twentieth century. Founded in 1928 just several blocks south of the Champs-Èlysées, the hotel began as a fashionable destination for wealthy Americans and other foreigners. Then, in the summer of 1940, the season when Americans normally descended upon the George V, first the French and then the German military laid claim to the ornate hotel. Four years later, American officers requisitioned the hotel and slept in beds that German officers had abandoned just days earlier. When the U.S. Army finally checked out in 1946, the hotel's managers were eager to revive the glamour the hotel had earlier won among civilians. Yet rather than retreat from the political role the war had given the hotel, the George V's staff newsletter encouraged the waiters, chambermaids, porters, and other workers to see themselves once more as part of the drama of international relations. With the nation's status as a world power in question after the war, good service toward elite foreign guests could win France much-needed supporters, especially among Americans. "In a hotel of this class," noted the newsletter, "we are all, each for his part and at his post, like 'Ambassadors' for our country."[1]

On the other side of the Atlantic, as Cold War tensions mounted, American travel writers also presented tourism in the language of foreign policy. One travel article, appearing first in Travel magazine and then in Reader's Digest in 1949, offered instruction on how to be an American abroad. Readers learned that Americans vacationing in Europe would likely encounter "the anti-American venom distilled first by Hitler and now by Stalin." At a time when U.S. policymakers declared friendly ties with Western Europeans to be essential for the survival of the "free world," each American abroad needed to speak humbly but confidently about the virtues of U.S. foreign policy and in the process become "truly an ambassador of good will."[2]

Americans' trips to France were Cold War holidays in that leisure culture in both nations fell under the shadow of postwar international pressures. Calls by travel writers and hotel managers for ordinary citizens to act as unofficial ambassadors reflected a broader ideal in which tourists, business owners, and service workers would advance their nation's foreign affairs while pursuing their own pleasure or work. Both the U.S. and French governments at times shared these hopes and created new policies to help ensure that Americans' leisure travel served larger policy goals. For U.S. policymakers, American travel abroad represented an economic and cultural tool that could help win the Cold War, a view also promoted by patriotic travel writers and by American business leaders in the international travel industry. For French politicians and members of France's own travel industry, hosting Americans became part of larger projects designed to promote French power and cultural influence in an era when French prestige seemed threatened by superpower rivalry and colonial rebellion.

Yet these trips were also holidays from the Cold War. After all, appeals to act as "ambassadors" implied concern that at least some tourists and employees needed encouragement to identify with the political roles assigned to them. American tourists frequently sought in Europe a chance to escape the tensions and constraints of life in the atomic age, a goal promoted by the international travel industry's colorful publicity. "Freedom was what the trip was all about," recalled one former traveler, referring not to political freedoms but to a more personal sense of individual realization.[3] French hoteliers and service workers, for their part, remained focused on concerns such as wages and labor conditions that often had little to do with French diplomats' agenda for navigating the Cold War world. In all, tourists, the travel industry, and government officials engaged in a complex give-and-take in which mass tourism became both an extension of and a challenge to traditional foreign policy concerns. This combination of tension and cooperation between leisure culture and foreign policy represented one of the central aspects of both nations' experiences with Americans' postwar travels.

This book tells the story of American tourism in France during the quarter century after World War II. It narrates this history by bringing together perspectives from both nations, expressed in guidebooks, popular movies, hotel and airline industry documents, French service workers' union records, and the writings and memories of tourists themselves. More traditional foreign policy perspectives appear as well, drawn from government archives on cultural diplomacy and propaganda, economic planning, and travel promotion. By integrating the worlds of politics, business, and leisure, this book reveals consumeristic dimensions to U.S.-French relations previously neglected by historians.[4] This approach also shows connections between consumerism, the Cold War, and globalization, three developments crucial to the post-1945 era but rarely considered in relation to each other.

The first of these three developments, consumerism, played a central role in shaping both France and the United States in the twentieth century. As social and cultural historians have shown, both nations increasingly became consumer societies where citizens relied on commodified goods and services to fashion personal identities and where growing numbers of workers and entrepreneurs found employment in hotels and other branches of the service sector. In another hallmark of life in a consumer society, government and business elites in both nations turned more and more to the expansion of consumption as the economy's basic function and as proof of their own political legitimacy.[5] As demonstrated by a lively historical scholarship, leisure travel emerged in the twentieth century as a major element of consumer society, one that reflected and even transformed the ways people have thought about their nation, their class status, their gender and sexuality, their relationship to nature and art, and other important social, political, and cultural concerns.[6] Although much scholarship on tourism focuses on national or local narratives, leisure travel has also been a profoundly international activity, and the history of Americans in France allows us to appreciate how global pressures and interactions have shaped the evolution of consumerism within each nation.[7]

Scholars of the Cold War, and of foreign affairs in general, also have much to learn from this consumer past. Historians of international relations have increasingly recognized the value of situating government policies in their broader cultural and economic contexts. In this view, traditional models of international relations that limit themselves to state policy and state-to-state interactions leave out the rich and expanding web of private interactions that connect national communities.[8] Tourism formed one such connection linking France and the United States. During the Cold War, major issues in U.S.-French relations included France's postwar reconstruction, the building of an anti-Communist "Atlantic Community," and often acrimonious negotiations, on political, cultural, and economic levels, over the United States' powerful influence in Western Europe. Tourism, this study shows, affected all these Cold War issues.

At the same time, Americans' travels in France represented a prime example of the growing economic and cultural exchanges now associated with globalization. The study of tourism shows that there were other major forces besides just the Cold War shaping post-1945 U.S.-French relations. Several of the signature features of globalization lay behind this travel: multinational companies, interdependent economies, and increased border crossings for both people and cultural practices. Tourism's reliance on transportation technology and its close ties to the ballooning service economy further underline its status as a quintessential feature of the twentieth century's globalizing world.[9] All this is not to say that the Cold War did not matter. Instead, the history of tourism suggests that we can best understand postwar U.S.-French relations by looking at the Cold War and globalization in tandem, viewing them as two broad forces that influenced each other.[10]

Taken together, French and American experiences with international tourism shed light on some of the central issues of global history in the second half of the twentieth century. In particular, I argue that tourism can help us understand a seeming paradox: how an era notable for the rise of interdependence and informal exchanges among nations has also been a time of entrenched national identity and persistent and even expanding state power.[11] This broad argument emerges through four supporting themes. First, the rise of tourism in U.S.-French relations was not simply the product of middle-class American prosperity or improved transatlantic transportation. Tourism's growth also depended on a transnational travel constituency, or a loose alliance of business groups, media elites, and government officials operating within and across national borders. In the United States, the core members of this alliance included airlines, hotel chains, travel agents, travel writers, and a group of supportive journalists and editors in the general media. During the late 1940s and 1950s, the alliance also included the U.S. government, eager to use Americans' private travels as a complement to official foreign aid. In France, the main promoters of American tourism were luxury hotel, resort, and restaurant managers and owners and, especially beginning in the 1960s, the French government. Service workers in France represented lesser members in this transnational travel constituency, in part because of their marginal position in government-industry advisory groups and because French working-class identity and interests after the war at times conflicted with efforts to attract wealthy foreign vacationers.

State support, it is worth emphasizing, was indispensable in tourism's rise. U.S. and French government officials subsidized transatlantic air and shipping lines, funded hotel construction and maintenance, negotiated airport landing rights, organized publicity campaigns, controlled passport and visa requirements, and, in the first years after the war, provided tourists and the travel industry in France with special access to scarce food and gasoline. This reliance on government support made industry leaders especially eager to present their businesses as servants of their country's national interests. Pan American World Airways president, Juan Trippe, a pioneering advocate of this strategy, spoke for the hopes of many American and French industry leaders when he referred to his company as a "chosen instrument" of his government.[12]

The importance of collaboration between public and private actors in tourism's expansion points to a second theme. Rather than simply overwhelm the power of national governments, globalization often allowed states new ways to advance their foreign policy agendas. When U.S. and French officials saw ways to exploit leisure travel on behalf of broader economic policy goals or cultural propaganda efforts, they developed a consumer-oriented version of the "dollar diplomacy" pursued by the United States in the early twentieth century. Like dollar diplomacy's cooperation between the government and powerful financial institutions, what might be called consumer diplomacy represented an attempt to harness private consumer activity for state goals. Although these government promotion activities at times brought unintended consequences for policymakers, they nonetheless illustrate how states have been facilitators of globalization, not mere victims.[13]

Historians of economic and cultural affairs have long understood how government officials conducted foreign policy not merely through formal diplomatic channels but also by cooperating with corporations, civic groups, and, to a lesser degree, labor organizations.[14] The concept of consumer diplomacy reveals that this list of actors has been even larger and needs to include the small businesses, service workers, travel writers, and, above all, the consumers who took part in international tourism. In the early postwar years, when both governments desperately sought to channel more dollars to France, diplomats turned to American consumer desires to help solve the problem. Government and corporate travel promoters also exerted a major influence on transatlantic cultural relations, shaping how Americans and the French have perceived each other. Tourism publicity, whether distributed by private companies or the French government's tourism office, spread images of France around the United States more widely than any official cultural diplomacy campaign ever did. Yet this dynamic remains obscured when scholars focus only on the government bureaucracies traditionally responsible for cultural diplomacy, such as the U.S. Information Agency and State Department or the French Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Cultural Affairs.[15]

Given the many groups involved in leisure travel, efforts to fuse mass tourism with official economic and cultural diplomacy goals did not always succeed. Tourists, for instance, were not inanimate displays of American abundance like those established by the U.S. Information Agency to impress foreigners with the American way of life. Conducting foreign affairs via tourism required policymakers to tolerate a more diverse cast of actors on the international stage. On the whole, however, U.S. and French government officials viewed tourism's rise as an opportunity rather than as a threat. This dynamic suggests that globalization in the post-1945 era encouraged states to adapt and decentralize the ways they conducted economic and cultural diplomacy.

A third theme in this book explores how Americans' travels did not necessarily yield new transnational identities but more often reinforced distinctly national identities. American vacationers commonly sought a France that seemed different from the world back home. The act of travel outside one's country also prompted many to reflect on what it meant to be an American and to ask what kinds of citizens ought to represent the nation abroad. For the French, hosting foreigners meant articulating visions of the nation to present to guests, choosing which aspects of the nation to publicize and which elements to leave unadvertised. This process could create tension within each national community. Americans often fretted over their compatriots' behavior abroad, while many French observers worried that their fellow citizens acted as ill-mannered hosts. Often the greatest animosities arose not between Americans and the French but within each community. Yet even these internal debates invited Americans and the French to define and police their sense of what it meant to belong to their respective nations.[16]

A fourth, closely related theme underscores the complex process of Americanization and transatlantic cultural exchange. Impressed with Americans' consumer power, French government officials and hoteliers scrutinized American hotel methods and middle-class leisure tastes. Scholars of Americanization have highlighted the adaptability of other societies in the face of American cultural or economic models. Local peoples, they stress, do not passively submit to American cultural imperialism but instead selectively adapt American practices according to their own traditions and needs.[17] The French reception of American tourists reinforces this emphasis on adaptability. As a tourist environment, France did not become Americanized but instead evolved in its own ways, drawing mainly on changing domestic leisure patterns. While American influences mattered in this process, so too did other international influences, especially from emerging competitors elsewhere in Europe.[18]

The question of Americanization might even distract us from other important aspects of U.S.-French cultural relations. Although almost all histories of post-1945 transatlantic cultural exchange focus on Americanization, travel boosters in France generally presented U.S. tourists not as Americanizers but instead as carriers of the "radiance" (rayonnement) of French civilization.[19] In the United States, travel writers frequently celebrated the ability of Americans to pay for long transatlantic trips, interpreting this tourism as proof of America's national greatness and wealth. French commentators, on the other hand, often found it more significant that Americans went to the trouble of crossing an ocean to pay homage to their nation and civilization. In other words, the same activity could appear to confirm either nation's grandeur. When it came to national self-confidence and cultural influence, tourism was not a zero-sum game.

Americans' leisure in France offers one of the best pairings of tourist and host for understanding the rise of international travel. Of all nationalities, American consumers held perhaps the greatest influence in shaping the twentieth-century international travel market. Historians often note that the United States produced a remarkable one-half of the world's goods and services in 1945.[20] These historians dwell less often on the international significance of Americans' unparalleled consumer power after the war. American travelers were a critical economic asset for France, at times representing the equivalent of over four-fifths the value of all goods that France exported to the United States in the early postwar years.[21] American airlines and hotel chains, especially Pan Am and Hilton International, also emerged at midcentury as innovators in their fields.[22] Travel industries in France and elsewhere did not always emulate trends created by Americans, but even when they rejected or modified those economic or cultural practices, American models figured in their thinking.

American travel to France is also especially revealing because the small size of immigration from France to the United States has made tourist impressions one of Americans' primary ways of knowing France.[23] In 1951, the Gallup Poll asked Americans for their "first thoughts" on hearing the word "Paris." For men, the most popular responses were such travel icons as the Eiffel Tower, "dancing girls," and "leg shows." Among women, the list began with fashion, perfume, landmarks, and nightlife.[24] Few if any respondents thought to describe Paris as the capital of an empire or the home of international organizations. As this study will show, Americans' collection of touristic themes infiltrated other images of France, including those in movies, political commentary, and news reports. French perceptions of the United States, although to a greater degree tied to other cultural sources such as Hollywood films and French travel writing about the United States, derived in part from French encounters with the millions of American visitors in their own country.[25]

While the United States produced the twentieth century's premier globetrotters, France stood out as the world's leading host. For much of the period under study in this book, France received more foreign tourists than any other nation, a status it also held at the start of the twenty-first century.[26] At the same time, France's cultivation of foreign tourism has been representative of trends in other host nations. Like other states in Western Europe and North America, the French government first engaged in modest tourism promotion in the early twentieth century. Then, in the middle decades of the century, the French state guaranteed paid vacations to its citizens, built and subsidized massive resorts, and encouraged the rise of a corporate travel industry. By the 1960s, even Soviet-bloc countries had opened their borders to Western tourism, and economic development experts were helping Asian, African, and Latin American nations boost their own travel industries. France's history as a host nation, if colored by specifically French contexts, can provide a window into how societies have cultivated and adapted to the growing global market in international tourism.[27]

Although a relatively sophisticated transatlantic travel infrastructure existed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the end of World War II provides a useful starting point for understanding connections between tourism and foreign affairs.[28] After recovering from the war's disruptions, transatlantic leisure travel experienced a remarkable boom. The 264,000 visits Americans made to France in 1950 grew to 792,000 a decade later, and then to 1.35 million by 1970.[29] Most important, the war also transformed U.S.-French relations, affording the United States unprecedented influence in France. As Chapter 1 shows, leisure travel immediately after the war formed one of the first arenas in which the French and Americans attempted to negotiate this new world together. From recreational tours for American soldiers in liberated France to the first postwar civilian tours in 1946 and 1947, attempts to revive American leisure in the ruins and scarcity of postwar France often proved controversial in both nations. Nevertheless, travel resumed quickly, a revival in which both nations' governments offered crucial material and political support.

By the late 1940s, tourists in France no longer needed ration cards, but government involvement in transatlantic leisure continued in new ways. Chapter 2 describes the rise of cooperative ties between Washington and the transatlantic travel industry during the Marshall Plan years (1948-52). Encouraged by lobbying from American airlines, hotel chains, and travel agents, the U.S. government set aside part of the Marshall Plan for an innovative travel development program. Operating under the notion that every dollar spent by a tourist was one dollar less the government needed to spend in foreign aid, U.S. policymakers promoted and even organized Americans' leisure spending in war-ravaged Europe. This consumer diplomacy strategy, which the conservative Eisenhower administration continued into the 1950s, constituted the high-water mark in the transnational travel constituency's campaign to combine its interests with those of U.S. foreign policymakers.

Travel boosters in France had a more difficult time gaining French government support after the war. As Chapter 3 shows, French travel industry leaders presented American tourism as a means to advance the French policy goals of national economic development and expanded cultural influence abroad. Yet, outside the circle of tourist boosters, American tourism inspired ideologically charged debates over whether the increasing numbers of American visitors represented not a source of French grandeur but instead a metaphorical colonization by the United States. France's powerful economic planners, for their part, favored the development of heavy industry and energy over a service economy and challenged claims by hoteliers and other boosters that hosting foreigners offered the best path for the nation. On the French left, advocates of state subsidies to send French workers on vacations of their own within France often opposed efforts to have the government spend more scarce resources to attract wealthier foreigners. Debates about hosting Americans did not simply emerge from French opinions of U.S. foreign policy or of American society. They also reflected more indigenous concerns with French national identity, social and labor policy, and strategies for postwar economic reconstruction. Given these reservations, the French government took a restrained approach to tourism promotion after the war. Although willing to provide special rations to foreign travelers in the lean years of 1946 and 1947, the government gave scant support to its tourism office and relatively little financial assistance to the country's hotel industry.

Hotels provided one of the main meeting grounds for Americans and the French, and they became sites of special contest during the Marshall Plan years. Chapter 4 examines how U.S. officials in the Marshall Plan attempted to reform French and other European hotels to make Europe more comfortable for middle-class Americans. This little-studied Marshall Plan program reveals new connections between consumerism and Cold War policy. It also illuminates the complicated process of Americanization. French responses to American-inspired hotel practices, in keeping with French perceptions of American tourism in general, reflected complex combinations of nationalism, Cold War ideology, and economic self-interest.

As they sought to align leisure with diplomacy, travel boosters in both nations frequently predicted that American tourists would return home imbued with a deep commitment to America's new alliance with Western Europe. For U.S. officials and supportive media elites eager to create a Cold War culture, an American public enchanted with Atlantic-oriented leisure would become firmly supportive of the government's new Atlantic-oriented foreign policies. French officials and travel industry leaders held similar hopes and added their own vision of how American visitors would acquire a positive image of France as a modern, forward-looking nation. Chapter 5 traces these public and private cultural diplomacy efforts and their reception among American tourists in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Showing that leisure could often trump foreign policy concerns, the majority of tourists refused to reduce their trips to Cold War-themed vacations. At times their writings, itineraries, and opinions even contradicted specific goals of French and U.S. foreign policy. Nevertheless, the cultural imagery generated by tourism, from travel guides to Hollywood musicals, on the whole offered symbols and narratives that could allow Americans to imagine themselves part of a shared Atlantic Community with France. To the extent that American tourists participated in any sort of Cold War culture, they did so mainly on an impressionistic level, not as self-conscious political actors.

The cultural-diplomacy dimension of tourism grew especially controversial in the United States in the late 1950s and 1960s, an era that introduced both transatlantic jet service and the widespread, if often ill-defined, concept of the Ugly American. Chapter 6 analyzes how Cold War-minded Americans perceived their compatriots' overseas travel. On one side, skeptics of mass culture criticized tourists for lacking the expertise and "realism" to serve as effective Cold War ambassadors. Another school of thought, with a more populist and consumer-friendly vision, held that the growing numbers of middle-class Americans able to take trips to Europe presented foreigners with symbols of American freedom and prosperity to which Soviet propaganda experts had no answer. Although neither side succeeded in silencing the other in this debate, the growing attention assigned to tourists' role in the cultural Cold War influenced and reflected broader initiatives taken by Washington on behalf of cultural diplomacy. Dwight Eisenhower's People-to-People program, for instance, borrowed from the populist spirit of travel boosters and aimed to harness private citizens to the Cold War cause. Later, John Kennedy's Peace Corps initiative preserved this ethos of populism yet rejected the consumerism that drove mass tourism.

While U.S. journalists, tourists, and diplomats in the late 1950s and 1960s fretted over Ugly Americans, the French at the same time engaged in a parallel bout of self-criticism concerning their alleged rudeness toward foreigners. Charles de Gaulle's Fifth Republic, established in 1958, even launched friendliness campaigns to improve French manners, with an emphasis on pleasing dollar-laden Americans. The notion of French inhospitality, although grounded in part in actual tourist complaints, also stemmed from the acute diplomatic tensions that strained U.S.-French relations in the 1960s. Most important, the stereotype of inhospitality had deeper roots in France's rapid urbanization and modernization after World War II. As Chapter 7 reveals, both French conservatives and French technocrats endorsed and amplified the negative national image, holding modernization as either the cause of or solution to France's inhospitality. De Gaulle's government itself reinforced the rudeness image to justify its program of modernizing the nation's travel industry. Blaming artisanal hoteliers for poor manners, the French state accelerated the development in France of a more corporate travel industry.

President Lyndon Johnson would have been happier if de Gaulle's government had not been trying so hard to attract and please American travelers. Chapter 8 shows how consumerism conflicted with U.S. Cold War concerns in a new way in the 1960s, when the relative decline of the American economy led U.S. policymakers to try to reduce the flow of dollars out of the country. In the face of a series of crises in the nation's balance of payments, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations' participation in the alliance of overseas travel boosters began to falter. American consumer spending abroad had become an economic liability, at least in regions over which the United States no longer enjoyed economic primacy, such as Western Europe. Yet when the Johnson White House sought restrictions on overseas tourism in 1965 and 1968, a broad spectrum of the American public successfully rallied in defense of Americans' freedom to travel and shop abroad, even if it meant reducing foreign aid or military commitments in Vietnam and Europe. The debates over Johnson's restrictions program offer a unique moment for exploring the political meanings Americans assigned to tourism in the late 1960s. As this episode revealed, consumer privilege, as much as militant anti-Communist containment, had become a core value shaping U.S. behavior in the Cold War world.

Although American tourism in France continued to grow in the following decades, the late 1960s and early 1970s provide a fitting end point for this study. In the United States, the continuing monetary crisis led to the devaluation of the dollar in 1971, in one stroke reducing the overseas consumer power that Americans had enjoyed as a result of their nation's post-World War II economic dominance. In France, the late 1960s and early 1970s brought a wave of high-rise hotels, especially on the outskirts of Paris. These new hotels were in large part the fruits of the French government's dramatically heightened intervention in its travel industry the decade before. In terms of state policy, the tables had turned. The postwar period began with the French government hesitant and the U.S. government eager to promote tourism to France. By the 1970s, their positions had reversed, largely in response to France's postwar recovery and the relative decline of U.S. economic strength.

These changes had important consequences for the tourists, hoteliers, travel writers, and other actors driving mass tourism. France's more traditional hotel industry, typified by the luxurious George V, faced new competition from multinational corporations and even from the French state's own hotel chain. In 1968, the George V found yet another occupier when a British hotel corporation purchased the establishment from the widow of its longtime French owner. Although the hotel continued to receive wealthy Americans, those Americans no longer held the commanding importance for hotels such as the George V that they once did. Through the 1950s and 1960s, Americans had accounted for a steady two-fifths of France's foreign tourism earnings. In just a few years, by the early 1970s, that portion had dropped to one-fifth.[30] Sensing a change in the United States' global position, one American magazine's cover story in 1968 asked of the American tourist, "Does He Still Own the World?"[31] In 1974, Le Monde announced that France's reception of foreign tourists was set to enter "the European age," meaning an era when neighboring Europeans mattered more than American vacationers.[32] American travel overseas continued to grow after the 1960s, but by then this consumerism was less exceptional and instead part of a more global travel culture in the late twentieth century.[33]

While American tourists never quite "owned" the world even at their peak influence in the quarter century after World War II, they did occupy a significant place in postwar international relations. Their travels in France became a branch of Cold War foreign policy for both countries. At the same time, the consumer exchanges created by this travel never fully conformed to foreign policy pressures. The chapters that follow examine in more detail this complex process of cooperation, conflict, and negotiation between the worlds of foreign policy and mass tourism.