H-France Review Vol. 5 (January 2005), No. 9
Christopher Endy, Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. 304 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $49.95 (hb); $19.95 (pb). ISBN 0-8078-5548-0.
Review by Whitney Walton, Purdue University.
Christopher Endy's Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France persuasively argues that travel, mass consumption, and diplomacy were inextricably linked in post-World War II relations between France and the United States. Drawing upon a rich archival and print base from both the United States and France, Endy presents the interaction of government policies, hotel and transportation industries, and tourists and tourism workers in a particular, transatlantic and Cold War context. The result is an engaging study that illuminates hitherto unknown aspects of Franco-American relations, and contributes to understanding broader issues of globalization and national identities.
After a brief consideration of an American tradition of pleasure-seeking travel to France prior to the outbreak of war in 1939, Endy focuses on the presence of American soldiers in France during and immediately following World War II, and the swift transition to the return of American tourists in the late 1940s. Both American and French governments sought to strengthen the Atlantic Alliance even after war's end, and both confronted challenges of reconciling postwar poverty in France with appealing to Americans' desire for carefree leisure travel in Europe. Tourism advocates in the United States also justified travel to France as defending a shared western civilization. Yet, numerous contradictions and challenges persisted under the Marshall Plan aid program, a subject that Endy probes extensively.
Endy argues that, as part of the Marshall Plan, the United States government embarked on an enduring campaign of support for foreign tourism. Initially, this effort was cast as a distinctive form of American "internationalism," that is, spreading a democratic model of middle-class leisure and consumerism as part of the responsibility of being a superpower. According to Endy, the inclusion of tourism in the Marshall Plan also appeased political conservatives who supported Americans exercising their right to spend as an alternative to doling out aid to foreign countries. In addition to putting much-needed dollars into the hands of Europeans, tourism promoted unity at home, so Marshall Plan adherents believed, with the implication that foreign travel was available to ordinary, working Americans, not just wealthy elites. Endy acknowledges that it is impossible to know to what extent US government policies, like lowering duty-free taxes and promoting tourism, actually increased the number of American tourists abroad and their spending, but he asserts that tourism definitely succeeded in helping West European economies.
Not surprisingly, there was a price to be paid for economic stabilization led by the United States in terms of French national identity. Endy examines the various ways that the Marshall Plan attempted to Americanize French hotels by reducing personal service and increasing modern conveniences (like bathrooms in each room), along with other measures intended to make American tourists feel comfortable. Endy notes that one hotel keeper in Burgundy had the original idea of a plumbing installation to pump red and white wine into each room, a local variation on the American practice of providing ice water for every guest! While some in the French hotel industry welcomed the increased government support to expand and modernize tourist accommodations, others resisted these measures as antithetical to a French identity of artisanal, personal service that might initiate boorish American tourists to the niceties of proper hotel guest behavior and expectations. By the time the Marshall Plan ended in 1952, American tourism in France was booming, but tourists and their hosts were not necessarily fulfilling the ideal of friendliness and mutual understanding that was supposed to consolidate the Atlantic Alliance against a Soviet Communist alternative.
Transatlantic travel became even more accessible with the introduction of low, tourist-class air fares in 1958, precipitating a debate within the United States over how successfully hordes of American tourists in Europe furthered American diplomatic interests. For those whom Endy calls Cold War realists, mass tourism was problematic because ignorant, hedonistic Americans came to represent the United States abroad, and they thought diplomacy belonged in the hands of trained experts. Populists, by contrast, supported a practice that revealed the benefits of free-market capitalism through ordinary American tourists.
With the start of the Fifth Republic in France in 1958 and the Democratic presidencies of the 1960s in the United States, Endy focuses more on particular administrations' tourist policies. A chapter on French President Charles De Gaulle in relation to tourism maintains that the image of French rudeness to foreign tourists was basically a myth, hyped in both American and French media on the basis of a few isolated incidents. Unlike previous administrations, De Gaulle's poured money, not just propaganda, into modernizing French tourist industries. This was offset, however, by his foreign policy decisions (pulling out of NATO, enhancing an independent nuclear arms capability, and opposing the United States war in Vietnam, among other things) that angered the United States, and so helped perpetuate the myth of French rudeness. Although De Gaulle's charm campaign, notably the smile-checks offered to American tourists in France to express their satisfaction with an individual hotel or restaurant's service, failed to dispel the French rudeness myth, Endy claims that his policies did indeed modernize the French tourist industry.
As Endy frequently proves, on both sides of the Atlantic, promoting consumerism was always more successful than trying to restrain it. United States President Lyndon Johnson discovered this when, in a reversal of postwar policy, he publicly discouraged foreign tourism out of the need to keep dollars in the United States and staunch the run on gold that the parity of dollars to gold in the Bretton Woods agreement had allowed. Many Americans and French objected to Johnson's move, suggesting that the United States would do better to cut spending abroad by ending the costly war in Vietnam than restricting Americans' right to travel where they wished. In the end, President Richard Nixon's devaluation of the dollar in 1971 that abrogated the Bretton Woods dollar-gold parity achieved what Johnson's call for limiting travel did not; it lowered American spending abroad.
Endy's sources are strongest in the areas of government policies, tourist trade associations, and popular representations of tourists, notably cartoons in French and especially English which are among the apposite illustrations in this book. He includes comments by travelers whom he has interviewed, but the actual experience of tourists is a minor component of this work. The book also invites comparative questions, such as did the Marshall Plan attempt to Americanize hotels in other countries (say, West Germany, the United Kingdom, or Italy) as it did in France, and with what results? In what ways did the United States government and travel industries promote tourism in other countries, for what reasons, and how did other countries respond? Endy provides ample figures to prove how important American tourists were to the French economy, but perhaps there is more to explain about the distinctiveness of American tourism in France, as opposed to other countries. These issues, however, do not detract at all from Endy's important accomplishment.
Cold War Holidays is a valuable contribution to the history of diplomacy, mass consumption, and globalization. It broadens the scope of what constitutes diplomatic history to include tourism with its attendant attributes of culture and consumerism, and it offers a new perspective on Franco-American relations from 1945 to 1970. Endy also proves that globalization is a combination of government policies and private enterprise initiatives with this case study of the Cold War period.
Additionally, Endy explicates a portion of the complex relationship between internationalism and nationalism. He notes the influence of a self-serving notion of American "internationalism" articulated by publisher Henry Luce in 1941 and propagated by the United States government and other promoters of foreign travel: that Americans had a leadership responsibility in the world that included vaunting the benefits of democracy and capitalism through mass tourism. Rather, Endy concludes that tourism actually nurtured national identities more than internationalism or a sense of common humanity. Travel boosters, he indicates, achieved success through highlighting French and American cultural differences, not their similarities. As Endy writes: "After all, why spend so much of one's leisure time and money to experience what one could find back home?" (p. 205).
Whitney Walton
Purdue University
awhitney@purdue.edu
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H-France Review Vol. 5 (January 2005), No. 9
ISSN 1553-9172
