Selling The Past To The Present

See America First

The emerging tourist industry in the United States promoted tourism as a ritual of American citizenship. Urging middle class tourists to refrain from visiting Europe when they had not toured their own country kept American dollars from escaping abroad, but also mapped an idealized American history and tradition across the American landscape, defining an organic nationalism that linked national identity to a shared territory and history. In Berkowitz’ A New Deal For Leisure, the industrializing countries of Europe and North America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries created a vacation away from home to constitute as a marker of middle-class status. The grand tour, once only an option for the aristocratic elite, had become accessible to the middle class through rising standards of living and lower costs.

Under the influence of the socialist movement, access to an annual paid summer vacation spread beyond the middle classes and came increasingly to be seen by workers as their entitlement in a democratic society. New Deal programs and changing attitudes of trade unions combined to create a new demand by worker families for the vacation as an integral component of their standard of living. In addition to advertising, other modes were applied to encourage middle class America to travel beyond their towns and see things they have never seen.

In the arts, sculptist Westermann tried his hand at printmaking with the same iconoclastic touch. Turning a popular advertising slogan for tourism on its head, Westermann created a series of prints titled See America First. Advertisers wanted Americans to travel domestic and spend their money in America to help fuel the American economic machine. Westermann calls on people to open their eyes and actually see the America they’re traveling in as a place desperately in need of a spiritual awakening. As flames lick upwards and surround a bare skull, the words “See America First” take on a sinister cast that belie the sunny optimism of the post-war period. Westermann’s work is perceived by some as anti-American, but there is a sense of the love he had for his country as an assemblage of people rather than as an abstract concept grown beyond the control of those same people. If we could only see America first as just the combined desires and hopes of ordinary people, then those desires and hopes might actually be realized.