Cold War Holidays

American Tourism in France

Christopher Endy

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780807863510
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Moving beyond traditional state-centered conceptions of foreign relations, Christopher Endy approaches the Cold War era relationship between France and the United States from the original perspective of tourism. Focusing on American travel in France after World War II, Cold War Holidays shows how both the U.S. and French governments actively cultivated and shaped leisure travel to advance their foreign policy agendas. From the U.S. government's campaign to encourage American vacations in Western Europe as part of the Marshall Plan, to Charles de Gaulle's aggressive promotion of American tourism to France in the 1960s, Endy reveals how consumerism and globalization played a major role in transatlantic affairs. Yet contrary to analyses of globalization that emphasize the decline of the nation-state, Endy argues that an era notable for the rise of informal transnational exchanges was also a time of entrenched national identity and persistent state power. A lively array of voices informs Endy's analysis: Parisian hoteliers and cafe waiters, American and French diplomats, advertising and airline executives, travel writers, and tourists themselves. The resulting portrait reveals tourism as a colorful and consequential illustration of the changing nature of international relations in an age of globalization.

Chapter 1

RATIONED PLEASURE

LEISURE BEFORE AND AFTER THE WAR

In 1946, with France still recovering from war, the American Legion approached French diplomats in hopes of arranging a postwar pilgrimage for as many as 20,000 Americans. The largest veterans’ group in the United States, the legion hoped to continue its prewar tradition of launching massive visits to Europe every ten years, a practice that began in 1927 when thousands of World War I veterans descended on Paris for a pilgrimage that became famous for its raucous drinking and patriotic speeches. The legion’s eagerness to sponsor a pilgrimage in 1947 presented a dilemma for French diplomats. With an eye on securing aid from the United States, French officials in 1946 had no desire to appear ungrateful to their former allies. Yet the French diplomats were concerned with the practical challenge of guaranteeing food, lodging, and gasoline for a large tour so soon after the war. They were troubled still more by what the legion, especially its leadership, might do and say once in France. France’s ambassador in Washington, Henri Bonnet, pointed to a recent speech by a legion leader in the United States who had declared that the best path to world peace lay in dropping a few atomic bombs on Moscow. After investigating the legion’s politics, France’s consul in New York described the group’s proceedings as racist, anti-Communist, and marked by boisterous public behavior more typical of “collegians on vacation.”¹

French officials feared that extending an official invitation to such rowdy and militantly anti-Communist Americans might make them appear dupes of American extremists. This possibility appeared especially worrisome at a time when the French Fourth Republic rested on a fragile coalition of Christian Democrats, Socialists, and Communists. Even after the ejection of the Communist Party from the coalition in May 1947, any government that rested too close to conservative Americans risked losing legitimacy in France. French diplomats thus debated whether their official invitation should come only on condition that the legion make no foreign policy speeches before the French or international press, an option ultimately rejected as too delicate to raise with the Americans.²

French officials, including future president François Mitterrand, then minister for veterans and war victims, thus set out to organize a September 1947 tour “with the greatest care.”³ Given a shortage of cabin space on transatlantic liners and airplanes, the legion could only manage a “token pilgrimage” through France with several hundred legionnaires. To prepare for the trip, legion leaders met with French tourism, diplomatic, and veterans officials, along with the director of the American Express Paris bureau. Together, the group sketched a nine-day itinerary, highlighted by opening receptions in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the U.S. embassy and tours of World War I and II battlefields. As the event neared, the French consulate and tourism office in New York City even pulled a few strings in an attempt to speed through customs a special shipment of twenty cases of whiskey for thirsty pilgrims.⁴

Despite the early French misgivings, both French officials and legion leaders had reason to be satisfied with the pilgrimage. Mitterrand, along with President Vincent Auriol, showered the legionnaires with pomp and circumstance at private receptions, while the major French newspapers did not bother to mention the militant speeches of legion commander Paul Griffith in their coverage of the tour.⁵ In his own post-tour report, Griffith himself seemed almost disappointed that the events did not inspire more vehement protest, “even though I included anticommunist allusions many times.” In his conclusion, he called for greater U.S. support of the French, even if the French government was not “exactly to our taste.”⁶ Lastly, although the whiskey shipment still arrived too late for the tour, U.S. ambassador Jefferson Caffery saved the day by making available the Paris embassy’s stock, thereby ensuring that the veterans would be able to revive some of the spirited fun from earlier pilgrimages.⁷

Although few tours received the same attention as the legion’s, the 1947 pilgrimage symbolized many of the political dimensions to American travel in France in the immediate postwar years. The tour demonstrated the eagerness of Americans to put wartime deprivations behind them and resume prewar leisure patterns. In this case, the legion wanted to reenact established traditions of travel to Europe, using France as a stage for another round of memorialization and boisterous flag-waving. The legionnaires were not alone in hoping to revive their touristic affair with France. As early as 1945, many soldiers and journalists incorporated such longings for old Gallic pleasures into their wartime experiences and representations of France. Yet the years of conflict had also changed travel experiences, especially because the war left the United States in a much more powerful position over France. In a reflection of this growing power, the legionnaires assigned their trips new postwar meanings, declaring the French government friendly enough to merit expanded U.S. aid. Although not all Americans visiting France came to the same conclusion on foreign aid, the use of travel as a soapbox for issuing foreign policy recommendations became a common feature of postwar American public discourse. The legion’s tour also reflected the balancing act that the French government faced with all American visitors. French officials sought dollars and favorable publicity in the American media but remained wary of the domestic costs that came with being too closely associated with the wealthy and fun-seeking Americans, especially in a time of material shortages in France. Ultimately, the French government decided that the foreign policy gains of bringing back American tourists outweighed the potential drawbacks. The years between 1945 and 1947 thus saw American travelers and French hosts struggling to bring a speedy resumption of prewar travel patterns while negotiating the new postwar contexts of French scarcity and unparalleled U.S. power. Despite the tensions created by new postwar circumstances, both groups were frequently able to work around their differences, as well as France’s material scarcity, to forge travel experiences that ultimately brought the two nations closer together in Cold War alliance.

Prewar Patterns

Like the legionnaires, most Americans heading to France after the war inherited a powerful set of traditions and expectations, most often oriented around the themes of self-improvement, consumerism, nationalistic self-congratulation, and a search for Old World difference. In the early years of the American republic, hundreds of Americans, generally wealthy white men, sailed across the Atlantic each year for education, business, and diplomacy. Most, like Thomas Jefferson, combined leisure and sightseeing with their trips and then used their experiences to establish a more cosmopolitan outlook and elite identity back home. Young men on versions of the British Grand Tour engaged tutors and often prostitutes as part of their rites of passage. Later in the nineteenth century, women embarked on “finishing” trips, where they cultivated an elite femininity with visits to the Louvre and excursions to Paris dressmakers. For men and women, travel to France offered an opportunity to learn the language of diplomats and artists, to contemplate classical and medieval traditions, or to study the marvels of Paris, whose street lights and sewers made it one of the most modern cities in the world.⁸

By the start of the twentieth century, American travelers to Europe began to number in the hundreds of thousands annually. Improvements in steam-powered ships and rising discretionary income for upper- and middle-class Americans helped boost travel to Europe from 35,000 trips in 1870 to almost 250,000 by 1914. Another push came from the increasing involvement of the United States in international affairs, which made many travel writers consider transatlantic voyages important for the development of their nation as a world power. Before the Great Depression kept many would-be tourists at home, the volume of Americans crossing the ocean each year reached a peak with 359,000 trips in 1930. Most of these tourists made France one stop on tours of several European countries. France’s reputation as a haven of both pleasure and refinement, as well as its convenient location between Americans’ two other favorite destinations, Britain and Italy, ensured that it remained on the standard tourist itinerary.⁹

Upper- and middle-class Americans also made a habit of viewing their compatriots’ behavior in Europe as a symbol of their nation’s broader role in the world. In Henry James’s popular 1879 novella, Daisy Miller, the figure of an innocent American girl catching her death in Europe provided a metaphor for American innocence vis-à-vis the Old World. By the turn of the century, as the United States undertook European-style colonial projects in Cuba and the Philippines, a new generation of travel writers invoked the character of Daisy Miller to demand that American women in Europe shed their innocence and learn to act as equals in European high society. Although these discussions reflected the leisure patterns of only a small segment of American society, they resonated widely among intellectual and cultural elites, who had long defined American national identity by comparing and contrasting their nation to Europe.¹⁰

American travel in Europe assumed symbolic value again in the 1920s when commentators held the behavior of expatriates and tourists in Paris as expressions of Jazz Age America’s reckless energy. As historian Harvey Levenstein has shown, traveling Americans in 1920s France became more comfortable and even emphatic in celebrating their pursuits of pleasure. Certainly this trend held for the many tourists and Lost Generation expatriates who savored their freedom from Prohibition-era America by taking advantage of strong drink and an even stronger dollar in France. This potent combination of alcohol and buying power helped make the American Legion’s 1927 pilgrimage, an otherwise somber trip to cemeteries and battlefields, an epic escapade of rowdy, whiskey-soaked good times.¹¹

Like the 1927 pilgrims, sober-minded and fun-loving models of travel coexisted for most Americans crossing the Atlantic. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, business leaders and progressive social reformers increasingly traveled to Europe with hopes of gaining lessons from European experiences with modernity.¹² French universities, looking for cash and international prestige, began to encourage enrollment by American students in the 1920s. Junior-year-abroad programs also began in the 1920s, even if overshadowed in popular memory by the exploits of the Lost Generation and legionnaires. While not all of these academic tourists were dedicated scholars, the spread of such programs illustrates how the rising emphasis on having a good time rivaled but did not displace the pursuit of self-improvement.¹³

In the early twentieth century, the growing numbers of Americans attracted increasing attention from French hotels and businesses. Americans at first had been largely overshadowed by greater numbers of European tourists. In the second half of the nineteenth century, for instance, a string of new luxury hotels opened in Paris and the Riviera to cater to a largely European clientele. Most famously, César Ritz in 1898 created his eponymous institution in Paris’s elegant Place Vendôme to dazzle upper-class foreigners, especially British elites.¹⁴ By the 1920s, however, the U.S. dollar rode high over European currencies weakened by World War I. Although still outnumbered by other Europeans, Americans assumed greater importance for the French travel industry. After opening in 1928, the Hôtel George V quickly became popular with Americans and earned fame as a place to spot American celebrities in Paris. Not all this new attention was positive, however, as a handful of Americans discovered in July 1926 when guided tours of “Paris by Night” came under violent attack from a right-wing mob infuriated by the U.S. government’s unwillingness to forgive France’s war debt.¹⁵

The Great Depression and then World War II proved even greater challenges to American travelers and their French hosts. Yet eve...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Consumerism, the Cold War, and Globalization
• Chapter 1: Rationed Pleasure: Leisure before and after the War
• Chapter 2: Fellow Travelers: The Rise of Tourism in U.S. Foreign Policy
• Chapter 3: Radiance or Colonization? French Divisions over American Tourism
• Chapter 4: Making France Safe for Middle-Class Americans: The Marshall Plan and the French Hotel Industry
• Chapter 5: Pleasure with a Purpose: The Struggle to Create an Atlantic Community
• Chapter 6: The Ugly American: The Travel Boom and the Debate over Mass Culture
• Chapter 7: The Rude French: Modernity and Hospitality in de Gaulle’s France
• Chapter 8: The Dollar Challenge: The Persistence of Consumerism in the 1960s
• Conclusion: Nations and Global History
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index