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Devil's Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West

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For discerning travelers planning a western vacation this summer, or for that matter, for anyone curious about the popular allure of the West, Hal K. Rothman's "Devil's Bargains" is a must read. Rothman, a professor of western and environmental history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, provides a richly detailed assessment and critique of the development of tourism as it has evolved from the late nineteenth century to the present in the inter-mountain West. Synthesizing the existing scholarship on tourism, enhanced by wide ranging primary research, Rothman reveals a fascinating, yet disturbing, underside to the glitz and glamour of the tourist economies firmly established in western resort towns from Santa Fe to Las Vegas.

"Devil's Bargains" presents a series of provocative histories recounting the development of resort towns and tourist sites across the inter-mountain West including the Grand Canyon, Santa Fe, Carlsbad Caverns, Steamboat Springs, Aspen, Vail, Sun Valley, and Las Vegas, among others. The book also codifies the history of tourism under a new interpretative framework which divides the development of tourism into three phases: cultural and heritage tourism, recreational tourism, and entertainment tourism. Beginning at the turn of the century with cultural and heritage tourism spawned by the transcontinental railroads seeking to expand passenger traffic, tourism evolved into recreational tourism made possible by the automobile and a growing fascination with exercise and the outdoors in the aftermath of World War I, and culminated after World War II with entertainment tourism dependent on the Jet airplane and the dramatic expansion of widespread prosperity, a leisure ethic, and a pervasive consumer culture. Rothman focuses on the Grand Canyon and Santa Fe to illustrate cultural and heritage tourism; various western ski resorts define recreational tourism; and Las Vegas embodies entertainment tourism. These three phases of tourist development reflect the historical transformation of tourism from an elite pastime to a more individualized, democratic experience, to a mass culture phenomena. They also reveal a process of economic development, reflecting the evolving strategies adopted by western communities to replace tapped out extractive economies.

Defining tourism as the quintessential service economy, the pinnacle of post-industrial capitalism, Rothman argues that the promises of tourist industries have been embraced as a panacea for economic decline in towns throughout the West. However, as his research reveals, locals and even "neonatives" have found tourism to be a bitter pill to swallow. Although the advent of tourist economies in places such as Jackson Hole, Steamboat Springs, and Sun Valley has resulted in phenomenal economic growth, prosperity has come with a price. As the book's title suggests, in the process of reviving the economy, tourism displaces locals with outside capital and corporate control, sapping a place of its soul, and leaving in its stead a facade of hollow images and a service economy manipulated by distant corporations whose only interest is the bottom line. What has emerged in places like Vail and Santa Fe is a two-tiered class system where workers who are predominantly people of color (Hispanic, African, or Filipino) hold low-paying, menial jobs providing for the comfort and amusement of wealthy second home owners and visitors. There is little room for an established community of year-round residents when the bottom line centers on the paying visitor. Las Vegas is the exception. In defining itself as the ultimate themed destination resort constantly reinventing itself to satisfy visitors' desires, Las Vegas remains one of the last places where unskilled workers can earn a middle-class income replete with benefits and job security. Las Vegas alone, according to Rothman, has succeeded at perfecting the service economy, becoming a model of sorts for the rest of the country. "The colony became the colonizer," he writes, exporting a model of entertainment tourism for a nation entranced by the spectacles of multi-media consumer culture.

In detailing the ways in which western communities reinvented themselves as tourist resorts, marketing an idealized western ambiance and a scripted history, and in the process losing control of the very community they sought to promote and preserve, Rothman provides a rich assessment of the social and political impact of tourist-based economies as they evolved from local ventures to corporate productions. But more than that, he presents a thoughtful and disturbing critique of the promises and realities of post-industrial, post modern capitalism as manifested in the twentieth-century tourist's West.

Marguerite S. Shaffer, Assistant Professor, University of North Carolina, Wilmington

For those of us who live in tourist towns and see how the incredible number of visitors changes them, this is the book! It looks at a large number of places -- from Santa Fe to Maui, from Las Vegas to Aspen -- and shows in great detail how they change. It reads well too, on a par with better known authors like Robert D. Kaplan and Tim Egan. I heard the author speak here in town--I guess he lives here-- and it made me buy the book. I came away extremely impressed. This is not my usual reading. I'm more a John Grisham type. But this one rang bells for me. After I read this book, I was in Thailand on business and I found myself using Devil's Bargains as a lens for what I was seeing. The comparisons were striking and I wondered if this book might apply to more than the West. Well written and snappy, showing a lot of research, this one is a real winner, especially for anyone in city planning or tourist development.

I was born into the park service and lived the tourist experience. This book really helped me form a perspective about my early years growing up in western tourist and resort environments. Western history is fascinating, but this angle on western history really gives another intriguing dimension to america's perception of the mythic frontier.

This book has rightly become a standard reference on tourism in the American West. Rothman explores the links between local culture and national tourism, locally-controlled business and the wider forces of American capitalism. Not surprisingly, he ends of telling a story of internal colonialism by which locals steadily lose control of their town, their culture and their economy as outside capital and ideologies enter. In the end, tourist destinations become Las Vegas, floating above and without any local culture or local economic participation, with workers immigrating from elsewhere to serve visitors from outside.

Rothman looks closely at Jackson Hole/Grand Tetons, Grand Canyon, Carlsbad Caverns and (surprise!) Jefferson Expansion National Memorial among the national parks; ski resorts like Steamboat Springs, Aspen, Vail and Sun Valley; and destinations such as Santa Fe and Las Vegas. Despite the diversity of topics, the book book feels dominated by ski areas - - perhaps because the transition from isolated community on cross-country skis to a corporate-owned resort staffed by outsiders feels strongest there.

There's a lot of local color in most of these accounts, as Rothman clearly knows some of these locales very well. That said, I wouldn't have minded the work of a sharp-penciled editor to trim perhaps 20% of the volume. The book is at its strongest in its introduction and conclusion, which present its overarching themes very well; and it is weaker when recounting purely local battles that, all too often, resemble the same stories elsewhere. All the same, it's a very worthy book for anyone interested in western history, environmental history, and the political economy of tourism.

At once extremely learned and passionately engaged, DEVIL'S BARGAINS puts forward a startling analysis of Western tourism. From Rothman we learn about skiing and much else: the economic and historical forces shaping our sense of place, our connections to nature, and our troubled relationships to one another. A travel book of another sort, it takes the reader to a vantage point from which our Western landscapes can be seen most clearly.

I read the book as part of a course I took, and I found the book to be too long, and somewhat dry. However, Dr. Rothman, a UNLV history professor, does make a very clear point: that tourists towns or places are dealt a "devil's bargain" in which they lose the authenticity of the place for the funds or profits that are brought in by tourists.

Overall, Dr. Rothman does drive his point home. But the same point is made in 20 different ways.