| This dissertation is a history of pleasure, profit, and politics. Specifically, it examines Americans' leisure travel during the Cold War as a feature of U.S.French relations. It shows how both the U.S. and French governments expanded their activities in innovative ways to harness U.S. tourism to larger policy goals. Emphasizing connections between domestic and foreign affairs in each nation, this study also reveals how the private actors engaged in tourism both exploited and resisted these state efforts according to their own interests. Travel industry leaders in both nations faced a balancing act, eager to align mass tourism with their nations' foreign policies while still satisfying the largely consumeristic desires of tourists. Using sources from tourists, travel writers, airline executives, hoteliers, service workers, and government officials, this dissertation introduces new, largely private actors to the history of U.S.-French relations. At the same time, it also underlines the critical role played by states in the growth of private exchanges across national borders that characterized globalization in the twentieth century.; Chapter One discusses the emergence after World War 11 of cooperative ties between the U.S. government and the international travel industry, especially airlines such as Pan American. Chapter Two describes French divisions over the perceived value of U.S. tourism for France's economy and national identity. These two national contexts meet in Chapter Three, which presents the Marshall Plan program to promote U.S. tourism in Western Europe through the Americanization of French hotels and hotel labor. Chapter Four shows how U.S. travel writing could either reinforce or undermine the U.S. Cold War consensus, while Chapter Five traces the expansion of middle-class U.S. tourism in the 1950s and 1960s and the corresponding emergence of the "Ugly American" stereotype. Chapter Six analyzes the rise of state intervention in France's travel industry under Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s, in part a response to the "Rude French" stereotype. The final chapter explains the continued growth of U.S. travel in France despite Lyndon Johnson's campaign to reduce Americans' overseas tourism during the international monetary crises of the late 1960s. |
