Seductive Journey by Harvey Levenstein

Author:Harvey Levenstein [Levenstein, Harvey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Europe, France, United States, 19th Century, 20th Century, Travel
ISBN: 9780226473765
Google: 0HCzzgEACAAJ
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 1998-10-01T02:56:32+00:00

Part Four

THE INVASION OF THE LOWER ORDERS 1917–1930

Fifteen

DOUGHBOYS AND DOLLARS

The “Guns of August” that rang out in 1914, inaugurating World War I, did so at the height of the tourist season. As Austria-Hungary, Russia, Germany, France, and Britain methodically mobilized for war, dumbfounded tourists congregated in their hotels, wondering what to do next. Among them were thousands of perplexed Americans in France, who watched in amazement as the streets filled with marching men who just moments before, it seemed, had been at their beck and call.

The tourists scrambled to make their way to the seaports and liners to take them home, but soldiers heading for assembly points clogged the stations and railroad schedules were scrapped. The French government froze foreign currency transactions, so banks could not honor Americans’ letters of credit and travelers’ checks.1 Americans short of cash to pay their hotel bills and purchase tickets for home besieged their consulates. J. P. Morgan and Company, the bank whose special relationship with the French government would later cause it to be accused of drawing America into the war, came to the rescue. It persuaded the French to allow it to transfer enough gold to cover its own letters of credit and advance money to Americans with other banks’ letters of credit and American Express travelers’ checks. It even loaned money to those who would merely sign a receipt. (Later, it said, only one such tourist failed to pay it back.)2

The mob at Morgan’s Paris offices soon subsided. By the fall, most tourists were home, leaving the French tourist industry as one of the war’s first casualties. One tourist agency is said to have taken some Americans and British on tours of the trenches in the spring of 1915, but, like many of the generals, its mindset was mired in the last war.3 Unlike Paris in 1871, this war’s slaughter offered no safe vantage points for morbid tourism. The French tourist industry could do little but wait for war’s end, when, said a French tourist bureau, the Americans and British would surely favor the spas and resorts of France over those of Germany and Switzerland, “in order to avoid encountering the detestable German there.”4 Meanwhile, the next Americans arriving in large numbers would be in uniform.

Of course, one cannot count as tourists the many hundreds of Americans who, before their country declared war on Germany in April 1917, came to France as ambulance drivers, relief workers, and nurses, or as volunteers for the French Foreign Legion and the Lafayette Escadrille of pilots. Yet they did reflect France’s enduring reputation as a magnet for cultural tourism. Many were upper-middle-class young college graduates who were the products of a distinct Francophilic turn in American higher education at the turn of the century. They had been steeped in French literature and had been taught that, unlike Britain and America, France valued artistic creativity and individuality. Wartime propaganda portraying France as fighting to save civilized culture and democracy found an enthusiastic audience among them. Some, such as the poet Alan Seeger, died for this ideal.

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