By Stanley K. Schultz
You've packed the car, got the tickets, purchased the traveler's checks, made sure your passport is current, boarded the dog, watered the plants, and done everything else necessary for the annual ritual. You are ready to exercise your hard-earned "right" to your vacation. We Americans have so many expectations we regard as rights that we have lost sight of what for most people in the world, including many of our own parents and grandparents, are privileges. The vacation, especially the paid vacation, is one of these. As recently as the early 1950s, most American workers did not enjoy a yearly vacation; certainly not a vacation paid for by their employer. Once the leisure pastime of the idle rich, now the annual paid vacation is our common expectation. Few college-educated Americans who can choose their occupations accept any job that does not include an annual paid vacation.

To have a vacation once meant to take off time from work, not necessarily to travel. But, today, some 50 percent of all Americans each year journey at least 200 miles or more away from home for pleasure and new experiences. As the brilliant historian Daniel J. Boorstin observed, in his book The Image or What Happened to the American Dream (1962), "we expect our two-week vacation to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless. We expect a faraway atmosphere if we go to a nearby place; and we expect everything to be relaxing, sanitary, and Americanized if we go to a faraway place." We seek the unique, as long as it can be familiar. Many Midwesterners, for example, vacation in Door County, Wisconsin, whose Tourist Council does not advertise it as a unique experience, looking like itself, but rather as "a little bit of New England in the heart of the Midwest." For Midwesterners who never have visited Cape Cod, Door County is exotic, yet comfortably familiar at the same time.

Up to the 1950s, relatively few Americans traveled anywhere. Today, tourism is big business. It is either the first, second, or third most important industry in 46 of our 50 states. To go anywhere in the United States is no longer to travel in the historical meaning of the word. "Travel" originally was the same word as "travail" meaning "trouble" or "work." The last thing American vacationers want is trouble or work getting somewhere and having to undergo difficulties to enjoy themselves on arrival. We are not travelers today; we are tourists. The word change is significant.

A tourist is a person who goes "sight-seeing" in comfort and safety to experience the unusual and the exotic. New Yorkers travel to Busch Gardens, Florida, to experience an African jungle. Oregon folk visit California's Disneyland to walk the streets of an "authentic" Midwestern "Main Street" of yesteryear. Iowans head to Acapulco to lie on sun-baked beaches and be served by Spanish-speaking waiters. The vacation has become a commodity to be purchased rather than an experience to be worked at. If this is true of domestic touring, it is even more true of foreign travel.

The pre-World War II American traveler went abroad to encounter the unusual. Now, wherever we travel, we want to encounter the familiar-the Hilton Hotel that looks just like the one at home. In reverse order, the three most popular destinations for American tourists, who spend around $5 billion yearly, are Canada, Mexico, and Europe. How ironic! It took two full centuries to bring fifty million people from overseas to the United States. Today, annually, more than five million Americans go abroad. Affluent descendants of penniless immigrants tour in air-conditioned comfort the scenes of their ancestors' oppression and poverty, exercising their "right" to rediscover the "romance of the Old World" on vacation.

© Stanley K. Schultz

Previous Town Crier Articles:

"Sex Scandals and the American Presidency"
"Voting Season, Television, and the 'American Majority'"