Category: Postcards

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What if You Became a Product?

A postcard called colorful Indians.
“Colorful Indians,” from the postcard pack titled All Along Route 66 sold throughout Route 66 postwar. Postcard from the author’s personal collection.

The rise of social media led to a concurrent rise in concerns about personal privacy. As social media companies sought to monetize their platforms, they took the personal information and activity of their users and “productized” it into advertising algorithms worth billions. As alarming as this modern phenomena was, the commercial process of turning the personal into the commercial is quite old.

As Erika Marie Bsumek documented in Indian-Made: Navajo Culture in the Marketplace, 1868–1940, while the reality of American policy towards Native Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was one of destruction, the American public, particularly in the east, were often disconnected from this harsh reality. In northwestern Arizona, the Hualapai had been forcibly relocated after the Hualapai Wars in the late 1870s to make way for railroad construction and white settlers. This cleared the way for development of Kingman, Arizona’s mining resources and capturing the water supplies at Peach Springs, Arizona. Rather than developing an understanding of the reality of American policy towards Native-Americans like the Hualapai, eastern middle and upper class Americans became fascinated with artifacts of supposedly “authentic” Native American culture. This “authentic” indigenous culture, however, often took the form of synthesized cultural productions and objects that were often highly inaccurate but catered to the majority culture’s nostalgic conception of what Native American culture was like. [1] 

As the “Colorful Indians”postcard indicates, this process did not stop after 1940. Many Navajo, including the well-known Code Talkers, served with distinction in WW2. After the war, economic necessity prompted many to take part in the same commercialized displays of Native American culture that late-nineteenth century middle and upper class Americans had demanded. No longer facilitated by eastern promoters or railroads, in the postwar period this commercialization of person and culture took on a decidedly local flavor with some help from national postcard companies.

A post card called colorful Indians.
This postcard depicts members of the Navajo Nation from Gallup, New Mexico. The brightly colored dress is not accurate to traditional Navajo cultural dress. Postcard from the author’s personal collection.

The ” Colorful Indians” postcard was printed by a national publisher and sold to motels and gift shops throughout Route 66. The postcard depicts the Navajo participants in dress that is not part of their culture. Largely an amalgam of Plains Indians and Hollywood “never was” depictions of Native American dress, the image was sold to middle class automobile tourists from the east reinforcing their preconceptions of what Native Americans were like. This was also reflected in the intense, stylized roadside attractions built by local boosters to lure in travelers off of Route 66 and get them to spend their money in town. The Wigwam Motel in Holbrook serves as a stark example with each motel room built in the form of a teepee – a style of housing not utilized by the Navajo.

Wigwam motel in Holbrook, Arizona.
The Wigwam Motel in Holbrook, Arizona. The native Navajo did not use teepees as a form of housing. Postcard courtesy of the Library of Congress.

As alarming as digital invasions of privacy can be, they are at least somewhat avoidable. Participation on Facebook, Twitter, or InstaGram is not required. One can carefully curate what information about themselves they release online. For the marginalized, however, majoritarian cultural appropriation can be difficult if not impossible to resist. For many Native Americans, the majority culture both actively engaged in indigenous cultural destruction and demanded sanitized versions of that same cultural for commercial consumption. While postcards like “Colorful Indians” may no longer be printed, the Wigwam Motel and other examples of problematic cultural appropriation remain actively in use. Often represented as fun harmless nostalgia, these objects and places raise a troubling question. What exactly are we being nostalgic for?

[1] Erika Marie Bsumek, Indian-Made: Navajo Culture in the Marketplace, 1868–1940 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008). Shepard, We Are an Indian Nation, 1-55.

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The Santa Fe, Fred Harvey Company, and Southwestern Tourism – Oh My!

The Santa Fe railroad and their hotel partner The Fred Harvey Company gave railroad tourists free postcards when they stayed in a Fred Harvey hotel along the line. Passengers used them to jot a quick note home and unintentionally promote travel by rail on the Santa Fe line.

Railroads were instrumental in developing the modern domestic tourism industry. A particular focus of transcontinental rail lines was enticing tourists to visit the American West. The Santa Fe railroad was no exception and almost singlehandedly developed and promoted the allure of the American southwest that still lingers in the American tourist mind to this day.

The Atlantic and Pacific railroad built the first rail line through the desert southwest in 1882. Never particularly successful, the Atlantic and Pacific went bankrupt in the Panic of 1893. A subsidiary of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad, the line lay dormant for a few years until its parent company arranged new financing to revive the line. Restarting operations in 1897, the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe reorganized the failed Atlantic and Pacific as the Santa Fe Pacific railroad – later known simply as the Santa Fe.

With the line dormant for so long, the new railroad had to rebuild many of its facilities and much of the line itself. With many of the old stops consisting of nothing more than a siding and a few locally-grown businesses of questionable quality, the railroad was tasked with how to provide services to railroad passengers along the line. This was an undertaking made particularly difficult by the remote, difficult desert terrain much of the line crossed in the desert southwest.

A Fred Harvey Company dining room. Fred Harvey facilities became known for good food, great service, and clean facilities regardless of whether a passenger dined in the formal dining room or at the depot lunch counter. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Enter one Fred Harvey. Receiving his first contract to take over the restaurant at a stop in Kansas, Fred Harvey remade the operation into a model of high-quality food, excellent service, and spotlessly clean facilities – often difficult to come by in the American West. This prompted the Santa Fe Railroad to enter into a partnership with Fred Harvey. The Fred Harvey Company became the exclusive operator of railroad station hotels and restaurants along the entire Santa Fe line. In the desert southwest, often the Fred Harvey hotel and restaurant were the only traveler hospitality services available in the remote region.

Postcards like this one promoted the American Southwest, particularly Arizona and New Mexico, as a place of natural wonder every American must see.

Realizing they could sell more rail tickets, hotel reservations, and restaurant meals if they gave rail passengers a reason to linger in the desert, the Santa Fe and the Fred Harvey Company began promoting the desert southwest as a unique, natural wonderland full of sites that could only be visited through traveling on the Santa Fe line and staying in a Fred Harvey Company hotel. Enlisting the help of architect Mary Colter, the Santa Fe and Fred Harvey Company built a series of iconic hotel and food service buildings. Destinations like the La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Arizona, the Escalante Hotel in Ash Fork, Arizona, and Hopi House and Phantom Ranch at the Grand Canyon became destinations in their own right.

The Fred Harvey Company Hotel Escalante in Ash Fork, AZ. Image courtesy of the University of Arizona.

Many of these once great facilities are now gone. The Escalante Hotel and the Havasu House were both demolished in the early 2000s after being abandoned for half a century. Mary Colter’s buildings at the Grand Canyon benefitted from being inside the national park and being designated a National Historic Landmark. It is, however, still possible to get a taste of travel in the desert southwest during the heyday of the Santa Fe and the Fred Harvey Company. The La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Arizona, considered by Mary Colter to be her masterpiece, was restored in 1997 to its former glory and operates as a hotel again. The rail yard behind the hotel is still in active use by the BNSF railway, the successor to the Santa Fe, allowing visitors to dine and rest to the sounds of trains in the distance.

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See America First! – Postcard Edition

See America First promotional postcard.
A promotional postcard from the Denver and Rio Grande railroad featuring one of their scenic excursion lines in the Rocky Mountains. Postcard from the author’s personal collection.

Consider the lowly postcard. Largely forgotten today, postcards were once big business and an almost obligatory aspect of family vacations. Despite their modern decline, however, postcards were instrumental in facilitating both domestic American tourism and aspects of American national identity itself. The vacation postcard also had a specific, deliberate origin in early American tourism promotion beginning in the late nineteenth century through a national movement known as See America First.

Historian Marguerite Shaffer, in her book, See America First: Tourism and National Identity 1880-1940 first investigated the significant role tourism played in constructing an American national identity. My own research built on Shaffer’s work and examined evolving local community identity driven by tourism in the twentieth century American Southwest. 

As Shaffer documented, tourists were encouraged to seek out American destinations for vacations, particularly in the American West, by the See America First movement. See America First was a national movement led by community boosters across the country, domestic tourism promoters, Department of the Interior and later National Park Service officials, and railroad and automobile company leaders that encouraged Americans to spend their tourism dollars visiting American locations.[1]

Although not explicitly articulated by See America First proponents, the arguments of the See America First movement connected to aspects of American republican mythology and national identity. Within this framework, tourism, particularly Western tourism, helped to reconcile virtuous agrarian republican mythology with the reality of the emerging industrial, corporate-driven, urban nation.[2] 

First Western boosters, and then a far more successful partnership between the railroads and the National Park Service, promoted tourism as an act of patriotism. These efforts encouraged Americans to visit the natural wonders of America like the Grand Canyon in an effort to know their own country and develop a sense of national pride. These efforts further redefined the natural world in the Western United States from harsh wilderness needing conquering to scenic wonder needing visitation. Through this, tourism became a type of virtuous consumption that reconnected urban elites to the original republican virtues of America through visiting the natural wonder of the United States.[3] Subsequent promotion efforts cast escaping to nature through tourism as a rite of passage required for virtuous citizenship.[4] Tourists themselves internalized these messages adding aspects of defining self-identity to pastoral tourism.[5]

A significant aspect of this national movement were promotional materials, most of which took printed form. Beginning in the late-nineteenth century railroad era, posters, newspaper and magazine articles, and other printed materials were used to promote the movement and grow interest in domestic travel amongst Americans. Although many readers may be familiar with the now iconic early twentieth century National Park Service posters, a far more prolific medium was often used to promote domestic tourism: the postcard.

See America First postcard featuring a railroad train excursion through the Rocky Mountains.
This postcard produced by the Denver and Rio Grande railroad was one of the many promotional postcards produced as part of the See America First movement. Postcard from the author’s personal collection.

Postcards like the one shown above were instrumental in advancing the aims of the See America First movement. Postcards like this one served two purposes: to reinforce in the tourist’s mind the importance of their personal journey out west, and to engender interest for future trips by the recipients of postcards sent by western tourists.

See America First postcard promoting modern travel by rail.
Postcards like the ones in this series were explicit in promoting American tourism, the technological progress made by America in a short period of time, and America’s status as a modern nation worthy of visitation via modern transportation technology. Postcard from the author’s personal collection.

These postcards, sold to tourists as souvenirs, were explicit in their mission of promoting America. Often focusing on the western United States, these materials promoted American natural wonders as destinations on par with anything in Europe. See America First postcards hailed hallmarks of the western American natural environment as the “cathedrals of America,” that were as worthy of visitation as any castle or capital city outside the U.S. Likewise, these postcards also promoted America as a fully modern nation commanding a continent through transportation technology and systems like transcontinental railroads. In this view, America not only had wild natural splendors worthy of visitation, but the modern means to whisk tourists to these destination with ease – all to the benefit of American tourism promoters.

The postcard as a means of correspondence, remembrance, or promotion has largely died out. In many ways serving as the canary in the coal mine for written correspondence and national postal services in general, the postcard along with hand-written letters, has largely been replaced by newer communication mechanisms like email and social media. Digital photography and Instagram eliminated the need to buy postcard packs to commemorate vacations. However, for a time, postcards played an instrumental role not only in personal tourism memory making, but in ushering in fundamental aspects of American identity like the ubiquitous family vacation out west.

[1] Marguerite S. Shaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 1-6, 130-168. Warren James Belasco, Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 1910-1945 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1979), 3-40.

[2] Shaffer, See America First, 5-6.

[3] Ibid., 7-39.

[4] Ibid., 219.

[5] Ibid., 264.