Beaulieu, Michel S.

English

Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

Histoire sociale – Social History, vol. XXXIX, no 77 (mai-May 2006)Comptes rendus / Book Reviews 281chapter nevertheless raises many more questions than it answers because, unlike thatof earlier chapters, the analysis is at a much higher level of abstraction. Clearly, theidea of citizenship as rights-based does not necessarily render micro-level practicesmore humanitarian and compassionate. Even the stark statistics on child poverty tellus that, as far as children are concerned, rights to safety do not necessarily coincideeven with their access to basic necessities of life. This concluding chapter also leavesone wondering: what has happened in between? What were the key turning points ofknowledge and practices? What genealogical moments shaped the more recent set-ting? What points of contestation and resistance did they encourage? This chapter isvery much a call for more research to fill these gaps. In Tending the Gardens, Chenhas provided researchers with powerful and innovative tools to build upon andextend this important contribution to knowledge.Karen MurrayUniversity of New BrunswickDAWSON, Michael — Selling British Columbia: Tourism and Consumer Culture,1890–1970. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004. Pp. 274.With the academic year over, I figured I was due for a brief vacation before the sum-mer research season began. I surfed the web and began to see what Canada couldoffer. I was soon inundated, regardless of region, with slogans such as “It’s All in OurNature”, “Escape Everyday”, and other assorted promotions assuring me that nature,urban escape, and history were all packaged in only this (or that) destination. Evenhistorical sites attempted to lure me with a combination of world-class re-creations ofthe fur trade and a rock concert featuring April Wine, Glass Tiger, and HoneymoonSuite. These were not the types of vacations I remember from childhood, or werethey? They also begged the question: how often do we really think about the origin orreason for these advertisements and when did leisure become such a commodity?In Selling British Columbia: Tourism and Consumer Culture, 1890–1970, MichaelDawson provides a stimulating exploration of exactly these questions in his exami-nation of how tourism promotion in British Columbia developed between 1890 and1970. The purpose of the book is simple, yet compelling: “examine and explain thetransformation of tourism promotion from a specialized form of civic boosterism toan economic strategy geared to the provision of mass-produced goods and servicesthat are fully enmeshed with a culture of consumption” (p. 10). Dawson’s explora-tion of trade magazines and the records of individuals and government agenciesinvolved in tourism promotion goes beyond being a chronicle of an industry’s devel-opment to make a valuable contribution to the growing discourse on the culture ofconsumption and the commodification of leisure in Canada.By means of introduction, Dawson provides an in-depth examination of both tour-ists and tourism promoters to demonstrate that, while tourism today is driven andmeasured by the amount of money spent, during the late nineteenth and early twen-tieth century its rationale was very different. Early tourism promotion, according to282 Histoire sociale / Social HistoryHistoire sociale – Social History, vol. XXXIX, no 77 (mai-May 2006)Dawson, was tied closely to issues of modernity and anti-modernity, but largelydriven by civic boosterism. His examination of promoters in Victoria and Vancouverreveals that the central message promised both modernity and the escapism of travel.But, Dawson suggests, “feelings of awe toward the sublimity of nature also engen-dered a desire to conquer the very topography that produced these feelings” (p. 21).This changed shortly after the First World War. The interwar years, Dawson dem-onstrates in his analysis, “ushered in a new era of tourist travel in North America asrailway transportation and hotel accommodation yielded pride of place to the auto-mobile and the auto camp” (p. 43). He ably shows through his scrutiny of promo-tional material that civic boosterism gave way to “a more urban approach toadvertising” (p. 43). This change, Dawson argues, was in keeping with continentaltrends of tourism promotion that moved away from written description to morevisual displays. Perhaps most interesting is Dawson’s discussion that, in contrast totoday’s embrace of images and other “things native”, tourist promoters in the firstdecades of the twentieth century shunned such images. In addition, in contrast towhat previous studies have suggested, while tourism declined slightly during theGreat Depression, it did not disappear.Selling British Columbia explores the establishment and activities of the BritishColumbia Government Travel Bureau between 1935 and 1939 and convincinglyargues that “the advent of large-scale government intervention in the tourist industrywould confirm a transformation in the nature of tourism promotion — from a variantof boosterism to a crusade in pursuit of a direct cash infusion on the part of consum-ers” (pp. 78–79). While in part recognizing tourism’s importance to the provincialeconomy, promoters during the period were mainly not those profiting directly fromincreasing levels of tourism, but “were primarily civic-minded politicians and busi-ness leaders imbued with a more organic conception of their place within society”(p. 81). In essence, tourism became for many the answer to economic difficulties andone largely geared to attracting Americans north.Like other aspects of the Canadian economy, the tourism industry in BritishColumbia was not spared from the upheaval and changes that followed the SecondWorld War. According to Dawson, the post-war period brought new challenges andnew approaches to promoting the tourist industry in British Columbia. In fact, Sell-ing British Columbia argues that two distinct phases emerged in the immediate post-war period. The first phase represented an attempt by tourism promoters to “sustainearlier levels of tourist travel in the province”. The second was “marked by a con-certed attempt to inculcate in American soldiers and civilians a desire to visit BritishColumbia once the war was over” (p. 120). Through his examination of the centralrole of the British Columbia Government Tourist Bureau, Dawson shows how thetourism industry was further commodified through the classification and cataloguingof the province’s attractions. Promoters essentially looked to the future, saw thepotential for a post-war boom in tourism, and attempted to put themselves into aposition to capitalize when it occurred.What, exactly, was being promoted? This became increasingly an issue in the post-war period. Tourism promoters between 1956 and 1970 sought to differentiate them-selves from efforts south of the border. In addition, tourism promoters becameHistoire sociale – Social History, vol. XXXIX, no 77 (mai-May 2006)Comptes rendus / Book Reviews 283“increasingly convinced that the tourism effort was an industry itself ... and moreconscious of the need to produce a tourism product that would not disappoint people”(p. 156). The means through which this was achieved was the commodification ofhistory for both international and domestic consumption. If current advertising is anyindication, this situation predominates in the industry today.As fine as Dawson’s analysis is, the reader is left with a number of questions unan-swered. While Dawson clearly states in his introduction that his study is not intended“to provide a comprehensive history of tourism in British Columbia” (p. 12), and herecognizes the limitation on his sources, it would have been interesting to see what,if anything, oral history could bring to the discussion (either that of tourists or someformer tourism promoters). There is also a question of the role of film in Dawson’sthesis. While he does briefly discuss the British Columbia Tourist Bureau films of1942 and 1964 and how they demonstrate the growing commodification of Nativeculture, these could have been explored in greater depth and the discussion expandedto include earlier attempts by provincial and federal motion picture bureaus.These minor criticisms aside, Selling British Columbia will no doubt spur a pleth-ora of further studies on the development of tourism in Canada and the relationshipbetween mass consumerism and the commoditization of leisure.Michel S. BeaulieuQueen’s UniversityELVINS, Sarah — Sales & Celebrations: Retailing and Regional Identity in WesternNew York State, 1920–1940. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. Pp. 222.This imaginatively conceived work sets out to explore a question that may appear“deceptively simple”, as the author playfully acknowledges. The answer is anythingbut. “How national was the national market of the 1920s and 1930s?” Sarah Elvinsasks in her important study of mass consumption and consumerism in early-twenti-eth-century America that invites us to rethink the power of the local in mediating thepressures and allures of mass culture (p. xiii). Turning her critical lenses to twomedium-sized cities in western New York State — Buffalo and Rochester — Elvinsuncovers the story of independent merchants and department store owners who didnot simply succumb to the homogenizing force of a national market, but ratherembraced it selectively and on their own terms. Adopting “a language of localism”,retailers in Buffalo and Rochester insisted that they alone could understand localneeds and desires. While Elvins acknowledges the mercenary quality of such asser-tions that fashioned local identity into yet another “powerful selling tool”, she dem-onstrates — in a richly textured narrative — how and why place continued to matter,for retailers and consumers alike. The department stores that dotted the central busi-ness districts of Rochester and Buffalo, she argues, shaped their cities’ cultural andphysical landscapes “in ways that their New York and Chicago counterparts did not”(p. xv) and acted as local boosters, cultural brokers, and sites of entertainment andeducation.

Dawson, Michael — Selling British Columbia: Tourism and Consumer Culture, 1890-1970

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Dawson, Michael — Selling British Columbia: Tourism and Consumer Culture, 1890-1970

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Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)