See America First

Now, we’ve heard about some surprising tourism so far– tours of asylums and thousands of people flocking to Gettysburg in the days after that bloody battle. But for wealthy Americans in the 19th century and before, the more attractive destinations were overseas.

MARGUERITE SHAFFER: Most Americans, if they’re thinking about travel for pleasure, are traveling to Europe.

ED: This is historian Marguerite Shaffer. She says that by the 20th century tourism boosters urged Americans to ditch the castles and cultures of the Old World and go west instead. In 1906, a mustachioed Utah businessman named Fisher Sanford Harris launched the movement called See America First. His catchy slogan was this– “See Europe if you will, but see America first.” This message wasn’t just about tourist dollars. He said that the See America First campaign was also about becoming a true American.

MARGUERITE SHAFFER: And so what happens is Western boosters beginning to make this argument that look, if you really love your country, if you’re really patriotic you will see America first. You won’t go look to Europe. Know your country. It’s really interesting, because if you think about the Civil War where people must have really been feeling like, are we going to make it? Is the nation going to survive?

And so once the war is over, this North/South identity thing, there needs to be a replacement for it. And so See America First is part of that conversation of we do have a place, we do have a nation, we do have shared history and shared traditions. If you are truly patriotic, you will see these things.

ED: And it’s very convenient that there’s a part of the country that’s identified as neither the North or the South– the West. So See America First– you go back and look at the materials– a lot of it looks like, see the West first.

MARGUERITE SHAFFER: Yeah, it really is this focus west, which makes sense if you think about what happens immediately after the Civil War. That’s when the first transcontinental railroad is finished. There’s this push for the Homestead Act to get people to move west. There’s Indian wars going on. So the West becomes this mythological place where you abandon your European ways, and your European clothes, and your European traditions, and your civilized life, and you go out into this frontier, and you build a new culture.

ED: But Schaffer says in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, exploring the frontier was difficult. No major roads led to scenic places and hotels were few and far between. The See America First couldn’t really take off until people could, well, see America, until the technology, mainly railroads, could get people out west.

MARGUERITE SHAFFER: And it’s really not until you get the Great Northern Railway and Louis Hill, the president of the Great Northern Railway company, taking on this idea of See America First, and connecting it up with the development of Glacier National Park that this movement begins to catch on.

ED: I’m imagining that the railroad was already going near Glacier National Park before he decided this would be something that all Americans needed to see first. Is that right?

MARGUERITE SHAFFER: Right. Of the transcontinental railroads, Great Northern is really the last one to extend its line across the United States. So you have the Union Pacific in 1869, and then that’s followed by the Santa Fe, and the Northern Pacific in the 1880s, 1890s, and Great Northern doesn’t really complete the line until the early 20th century.

ED: So what’s left over for that railroad to take people to then?

MARGUERITE SHAFFER: So they are going in the northern route running from Minneapolis to Portland, Seattle, and their line runs across the edge of what will become Glacier National Park. So Louis Hill, following in the tradition of the Northern Pacific Railroad and of the Santa Fe Railroad begins to advocate for the passage of a bill to put aside the land in northern Montana as a park, and then begins to invest in developing the infrastructure for that park. He hires an architect to develop and build nine Swiss chalets along the Continental Divide.

ED: Now, wait a minute. Wait a minute! I thought we’re seeing America first. What’s the point of building Swiss chalets if you’re going to have an American landscape?

MARGUERITE SHAFFER: Well, this is what’s really wonderful about Glacier. He calls it the American Alps.

ED: Wait.

MARGUERITE SHAFFER: He does. He bangs together this diverse melange of references from the Blackfeet Indians who welcome people at the station to the Japanese lanterns that adorn the hotel and the Japanese women who serve tea on a little tea cart in the afternoons at the hotel.

ED: Wait, wait, wait. We got Swiss chalets and Japanese tea ceremonies?

MARGUERITE SHAFFER: Yeah. So he’s really mixing it all together in the tradition of everything comes together in America.

ED: Is there anything uniquely American about this then?

MARGUERITE SHAFFER: For one, the Japanese link. He wants to promote his railroad line as going from the Midwest to the Pacific Northwest, which is then a link to the Orient as he would have called it. One of their railroad lines is called the Oriental Limited.

ED: Very limited, isn’t it? It’s a long way to the Orient.

MARGUERITE SHAFFER: But it’s in the tradition of manifest destiny, that we are following our destiny to expand trade to the edge of the continent and then beyond. You get the wonders of the world in Montana.

ED: So let’s say it’s 1912. I’m a rich Chicago businessman with some time to kill, and I want to go out and see Glacier National Park via the Great Northern Railroad. What I want to know is what will I see? Is it just going to be hotels and resorts?

MARGUERITE SHAFFER: Right. So you are going to spend your first nights at the Glacier Park Hotel in luxury, and then you’re going to go roughing it. Perhaps you’d be escorted by the famous rancher, Howard Eaton, and he would take you on a packed trip where you would have all of your supplies carried by mule and horse. He would set up camps. You would have dinner made for you and you would have a cot and a tent, and he would take you up into the mountains where you would see not only the glaciers, but fields of wild flowers, alpine lakes, and you would travel from spot to spot.

You could either be camping out with him or staying in one of the Swiss chalets along the way. And so you would be completely rejuvenated. You’d get fresh air. They would fish for trout for you, and you would have trout in the morning, and then you would pack your stuff up, and you would walk and hike, and then you would go to the next chalet for the night.

ED: So I’m sure there’s so much to see there that there must be things to bring back as well. What would I be bringing back from Glacier National Park?

MARGUERITE SHAFFER: This is really the moment where tourists begin to make their own mementos, so they write about their journeys and they create these elaborate beautiful scrapbooks that become the embodiment of this memory– of the places that they went, the people they met, and there really is this conversation about really meeting the people of America, people from all over the United States.

ED: So that’s inspiring to hear about all this. It sounds like I could even come back in some ways as a better person.

MARGUERITE SHAFFER: A large component of this experience was not just about sightseeing. Mary Roberts Rinehart, who is a famous writer wrote for the Saturday Evening Post, has this incredible quote where she says, “Come to the mountains and save your sou.”

ED: Wow.

MARGUERITE SHAFFER: There really was this feeling that it is the scenery that will move your soul. It will transform you, and that this is really the core of what has defined the greatness of America. You were answering the call to become an American by making this journey.

ED: All that sounds great, but could many Americans afford to do This

MARGUERITE SHAFFER: No. It’s expensive to get there and it’s also there is no paid vacation yet. Hourly wage laborers are not being given time off to go travel to see the national parks. So it was definitely an elite upper class pastime.

ED: So it’s elite clientele that’s going to Glacier. Does this resonate with a broader audience of people who can’t actually make that journey?

MARGUERITE SHAFFER: Yes. So the level of publicity and the level of information that was being shared, I think, captured people’s attention. And there were other ways to travel. For example, at the same moment you begin to get lecturers traveling around the country with stereoscope slideshows, providing armchair travel experiences. You begin to see magazines like the Century and the Saturday Evening Post promoting stories about travel in the United States and the scenic wonders.

This is the beginning of film and there’s even some early films that are depicting the magnificent landscapes. And I think this is the success of places like Yosemite and Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon is it’s not just the experience of actually going there. But it’s also the imagery and the stories and the kind of cultural cachet that that gets connected up with these places that makes people feel connected to them.

ED: Marguerite Shaffer is a historian at Miami University and the author of See America First– Tourism and National Identity, 1880 to 1940.