Anthony J. Stanonis. Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern Tourism, 1918-1945. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006. xiv + 317 pp. $22.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8203-2822-5; $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8203-2817-1.
Reviewed by Wendy Adams King (Department of Communication, University of South Florida)
Published on H-Travel (March, 2007)
From Modern City to Romantic Tourist Destination: The Transformation of New Orleans
In the immediate wake of Hurricane Katrina, Americans felt a collective sigh of relief as the first images streamed in from the media, which attested to the survival of New Orleans's famed French Quarter. The initial focus on the tourist district, versus other areas in the city directly affected by the disaster, in part suggests the important role that tourism plays in New Orleans's reputation as a city of cultural significance in the United States. Those interested in learning more about the creation and early influence of New Orleans's tourist image will welcome Anthony J. Stanonis's well-written, convincingly argued book, Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern Tourism, 1918-1945. Stanonis's study examines how the quest for tourist dollars during New Orleans's interwar years shaped the modern city and its present mythology. The book more specifically explores the Big Easy as the legacy of ordinary, interwar New Orleanians. In order to lure tourists into the city, citizen groups and businessmen worked to transform the city from an industrial port and symbol of efficient, American modernity into a ribald vacation zone--a place that could stand out in contrast to the relatively homogenized United States of the interwar years by embodying a romanticized and foreign past. "Mass tourism," Stanonis argues, "developed from the hard work of shrewd New Orleanians as they adapted to rapidly changing conditions within American culture ... In short, The Big Easy was made" (p. 244).
The bulk of the book, then, focuses on the level of popular and everyday life in New Orleans and is devoted to examining the activities of small businessmen and community leaders that helped make over the industrial port into one of the premium urban travel destinations in the United States. To support his arguments, Stanonis effectively draws on a wide array of sources, including newspaper articles, promotional ephemera, and business correspondence. Using such diverse materials, Stanonis is able to trace the history and significance of the cultural heritage districts and festivals, which volunteers in organizations such as the Rotary Club, Chamber of Commerce, and Woman's League developed to promote tourism in New Orleansduring the interwar era. Chapter 5, "A City That Care Forgot: The Reinvention of New Orleans Mardi Gras," for example, is devoted to examining the Romantic rhetoric and aesthetics used to promote Mardi Gras for tourist consumption. "Tourism boosters shaped the city's urban culture for the benefit of tourists," writes Stanonis, and their efforts to repackage New Orleans as a romantic vacation destination "closely follows the emergence of Mardi Gras as a hallmark tourist event designed with the pleasure of visitors in mind" (p. 27).
Although Stanonis's emphasis on the collective efforts of citizens is a welcome contrast to studies that focus on the actions of political power players, the real strength of the book is its examination of the ways in which the creation of the Big Easy was informed by issues of race, class, and gender. Refusing to sugarcoat the actions of civic-minded interwar New Orleanians, Stanonis devotes the second half of the book to interrogating how race, class, and gender functioned in the reframing and taming of New Orleans. According to Stanonis, the efforts of tourism boosters were conducted, more often than not, in the spirit of making New Orleans more palatable to the tastes and values of middle-class white Americans who could newly afford the luxury to travel (via the introduction of the paid vacation, affordable car, and government-financed highway system). "White civic leaders structured the cityscape," contends Stanonis, "to reflect their vision of the past and to reinforce their values in the present" (p. 213). Stanonis cites the relocation of New Orleans's infamous red light district and the Clean Up New Orleans beautification program, for example, as two of the many ways in which citizen groups reinvented the cityscape to appeal to middle-class whites. Tidying up the cityscape and removing the brothels from the French Quarter, argues Stanonis, were a direct response to the sudden influx of white travelers seeking new, welcoming places to visit.
The reinvention of New Orleans as a vacation destination for white Americans was not limited to merely the reduction of trash and the relocation of vice. In the chapter "Old New Orleans: Race and Tourism," Stanonis more specifically addresses the racist attitudes which fueled New Orleans's city policies and tourist promotions during the interwar years. Stanonis argues persuasively that "in a city that increasingly marketed itself to white American tourists, the reduction of blacks to stereotypes eliminated the threat of black agency, with its potential to disrupt the carefully constructed image of New Orleans as an exotic, romantic leisure site defined by white American middle-class standards" (p. 213). The white middle-class residents of New Orleans went to great lengths to "whitewash" its history by downplaying the city's black heritage. Black Creoles such as Jelly Roll Morton, for example, were forced to emphasize their "white heritage" and to downplay black contributions to the city. Further supporting his point, Stanonis also details how tourism boosters first shunned the city's jazz scene. The increasing numbers of white youth traveling to New Orleans to hear jazz bands, Stanonis explains, put parents on edge. They feared that the music might lead to the disorder and immorality linked to blacks at the time. Yet the popularity of jazz music amongst America's white youth quickly forced conservative promoters to endorse jazz, first as played by white musicians and then later by black musicians. Only in the latter half of the twentieth century, after civil rights' legislation had gained wide acceptance in the United States, did city boosters fully embrace New Orleans's now signature jazz music and black heritage.
Although a significant portion of the book is rightly devoted to issues of power, race, and class, Stanonis also addresses the ways in which gender politics profoundly reshaped New Orleans during the interwar years. Chapter 3, "A New Babylon: Vice and Gender in New Orleans," examines at length the important role that ordinary women played in creating the Big Easy as it is known today. Stanonis begins his discussion with the success of the women's suffrage movement. The newly won right to vote, opened up urban, public spaces, which had once been synonymous with men and women of ill-repute, to middle-class, "respectable" women. Responding to the influx of middle-class women to public spaces, New Orleans's boosters thus worked to end sanctioned prostitution and to introduce stricter drinking laws. Reforms such as these were aimed at attracting female travelers by making certain neighborhoods into safe and respectable tourist districts. "A growing number of women," writes Stanonis, "took advantage of the freedoms afforded to them by the morally and physically cleansed urban space to adopt practices long associated with so-called 'public' women, thereby making possible a tourist industry aimed at both sexes" (p. 129). Stanonis also devotes a second chapter, "French Town: The Reconstruction of the Vieux Carre," to the activist women, who helped to remake New Orleans. Female activists, he notes, helped shaped the Big Easy's distinct tourist landscape. They rallied against businessmen, who were pushing for the demolition of the city's oldest buildings in the name of modernization and profit. The preservation movement resulted in, among other things, the protection of the French Quarter and the establishment of neighborhoods (e.g., the Garden District) as tourist attractions.
Overall Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern Tourism 1918-1945 is a text with many strengths and few weaknesses. Stanonis's work is a well-crafted case study of how the rise of mass tourism in the early twentieth century transformed an urban landscape into one of America's most beloved tourist destinations. In entertaining prose, Stanonis tells the story of the creation of the Big Easy through the words and actions of the volunteers and businessmen, who were determined to reframe their city as a romantic and exotic tourist destination. His exploration of the complex ways in which race, class, and gender informed the actions of these ordinary New Orleanians is both nuanced and accessible--a virtue that will be welcomed by both a general and scholarly audience. In addition, the text contains a handful of charts and maps that help clarify information. The archive photographs provided are, however, sparse and could have been expanded. This would have enhanced the book's broader appeal and would have helped to better illustrate the changes which Stanonis describes in great detail. Finally, Stanonis's work contains one very important omission. The voices and actions of citizens who resisted the transformation of New Orleans into a tourist city are virtually absent from the book. Stanonis mentions briefly that a fraction of businessmen believed that New Orleans's future should remain in industry, but for the most part the book reads as if all of the citizens of New Orleans welcomed tourism in a unified chorus. Yet certainly there is another story to be told here about how and in what ways some of New Orleans's citizens resisted the transformation of their city into the Big Easy.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-travel.
Citation:
Wendy Adams King. Review of Stanonis, Anthony J., Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern Tourism, 1918-1945.
H-Travel, H-Net Reviews.
March, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12924
Copyright © 2007 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.