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Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern Tourism, 1918-1945
Between the World Wars, New Orleans transformed its image from that of a corrupt and sullied port of call into that of a national tourist destination. Anthony J. Stanonis tells how boosters and politicians reinvented the city to build a modern mass tourism industry and, along the way, fundamentally changed the city's cultural, economic, racial, and gender structure.
Stanonis looks at the importance of urban development, historic preservation, taxation strategies, and convention marketing to New Orleans' makeover and chronicles the city's efforts to domesticate its jazz scene, "democratize" Mardi Gras, and stereotype local blacks into docile, servile roles. He also looks at depictions of the city in literature and film and gauges the impact on New Orleans of white middle-class America's growing prosperity, mobility, leisure time, and tolerance of women in public spaces once considered off-limits.
Visitors go to New Orleans with expectations rooted in the city's "past": to revel with Mardi Gras maskers, soak up the romance of the French Quarter, and indulge in rich cuisine and hot music. Such a past has a basis in history, says Stanonis, but it has been carefully excised from its gritty context and scrubbed clean for mass consumption.
Stanonis looks at the importance of urban development, historic preservation, taxation strategies, and convention marketing to New Orleans' makeover and chronicles the city's efforts to domesticate its jazz scene, "democratize" Mardi Gras, and stereotype local blacks into docile, servile roles. He also looks at depictions of the city in literature and film and gauges the impact on New Orleans of white middle-class America's growing prosperity, mobility, leisure time, and tolerance of women in public spaces once considered off-limits.
Visitors go to New Orleans with expectations rooted in the city's "past": to revel with Mardi Gras maskers, soak up the romance of the French Quarter, and indulge in rich cuisine and hot music. Such a past has a basis in history, says Stanonis, but it has been carefully excised from its gritty context and scrubbed clean for mass consumption.
344 pages, Paperback
First published June 5, 2006
53 people want to read
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February 18, 2021
This was a very good, pretty scholarly account of, as it says, the development of modern tourism, and how that affected New Orleans, especially in the creation of a mythic identity. I learned some interesting things, such as that city leaders and businessmen used to discourage references to the city's past, wanting to position N.O. as a modern business center, but that later, realizing the value of tourism during economic downturns, they tried to craft a single "authentic" historical identity. Then, when individual Mardi Gras masking became popular, it wasn't a grass-roots tradition, but got started by tourism planners who promoted costume contests and events, in order to give parade-goers more to do and see in between parades, increasing the value of a Mardi Gras vacation. Much the way that science fiction convention encourages cosplay by their attendants, as an attraction that the convention doesn't have to pay for.
I also got some new perspectives on more national issues, like the rise of the automobile, and the disruptive effect it had on the ability of elite groups to control local economies. There's also a fair bit about the role of women in society. While people still complain about women making things no fun with their expectations of cleanliness or safety, I've heard even more of these complaints from turn-of-the-century male writers, who often decried the presence of women as ruining the rough and tumble of male society (most notably in the dominance of women in the Temperance movement). I've not thought a lot about this, so the case made here is quite intriguing: that the nature of the male drinking culture helped keep women from participating in public life, by making it obviously unsafe for them. In such a male-dominated environment, where the standards of behavior were low, women in public received harassment and were often assumed to be prostitutes. Temperance was an extreme reaction that did clean up the streets long enough for women to be able to go to their jobs and errands without violence, and once the norms had shifted, women were able to start going to bars themselves. The author supports this case pretty well!
There's also material about race in the city during this time period: the appropriation of Black culture in creating the city's story, racist promotional imagery, and the city's conflicted attitude toward Black tourists. This could almost be a whole other book, but it's a good entry point to some of these ideas.
Even though this book openly focuses on a specific time period, I would have preferred something that connects its themes to the modern era, although I guess that's a moving target.
Interestingly, the morning after I finished this, I went to a meeting for work in which the value of "authenticity" was discussed, and I was acutely aware of what a problematic concept this is. Businesses, places, and people craft scripts and hone personas to appear more authentic, and this has been going on for generations. So this book has given me a lot to think about.
I also got some new perspectives on more national issues, like the rise of the automobile, and the disruptive effect it had on the ability of elite groups to control local economies. There's also a fair bit about the role of women in society. While people still complain about women making things no fun with their expectations of cleanliness or safety, I've heard even more of these complaints from turn-of-the-century male writers, who often decried the presence of women as ruining the rough and tumble of male society (most notably in the dominance of women in the Temperance movement). I've not thought a lot about this, so the case made here is quite intriguing: that the nature of the male drinking culture helped keep women from participating in public life, by making it obviously unsafe for them. In such a male-dominated environment, where the standards of behavior were low, women in public received harassment and were often assumed to be prostitutes. Temperance was an extreme reaction that did clean up the streets long enough for women to be able to go to their jobs and errands without violence, and once the norms had shifted, women were able to start going to bars themselves. The author supports this case pretty well!
There's also material about race in the city during this time period: the appropriation of Black culture in creating the city's story, racist promotional imagery, and the city's conflicted attitude toward Black tourists. This could almost be a whole other book, but it's a good entry point to some of these ideas.
Even though this book openly focuses on a specific time period, I would have preferred something that connects its themes to the modern era, although I guess that's a moving target.
Interestingly, the morning after I finished this, I went to a meeting for work in which the value of "authenticity" was discussed, and I was acutely aware of what a problematic concept this is. Businesses, places, and people craft scripts and hone personas to appear more authentic, and this has been going on for generations. So this book has given me a lot to think about.
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