Abstract This article uses a case study of New Orleans to illustrate the nexus of commodification and rationalization in the development of urban tourism during the first half of the 20th century. Tourism is exemplary of the consumption of space and involves the circulation of people to particular locations to consume local culture, nature, history, or otherness. I examine the role of urban literary writers, visitor guidebooks, and the New Orleans Association of Commerce in constructing a ‘destination image’. As a collection of symbols and motifs representing a locale, a destination image is a visual cue that acts both as an attraction for potential tourists and as a cultural framework for authenticating the tourists’ experience once they arrive in the city. I argue that creating and (re)producing a destination image and assorted urban symbols requires an institutional system or set of formal organizations. Institutions and organizations create the rules, routines, and structures that shape how tourism markets and destination images develop, how actors present and arrange symbols to persuade people to invest in and travel to cities, and how actors develop promotional strategies. Analysis of rationalization and commodification in the production of a destination image offers a unique perspective for understanding tourism as a major consumption practice constituted by a set of ‘distant’ processes and ‘local’ practices.

Key words authenticity ● commodification ● New Orleans ● rationalization ● tourism

Journal of Consumer Culture

(London, Los Angeles, New Delhi and Singapore)

Vol 7(3): 305–334 1469-5405 [DOI: 10.1177/1469540507085254]

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INTRODUCTION Recent years have witnessed the growth of a burgeoning literature on the rise of urban tourism, entertainment, and consumer culture. Scholars have noted that during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, tourism shifted from a set of leisure activities for members of the elite to a mass phenom- enon with hotels, conventions, and other facilities making up the expand- ing industry (Desmond, 1999; Gottdiener, 2000, 2001; Rojek and Urry, 1997; Urry, 2002). During this period, US cities began to create specific organizations and promotional strategies to advertise themselves as attrac- tive places for commercial investment and pleasure travel. In addition to sponsoring international expositions, cities established chambers of commerce, commercial and industrial associations, and placed advertising in newspapers and magazines to attract visitors and enhance local distinc- tiveness (Cocks, 2001; Ewen, 1976; Hannigan, 1998; Leach, 1993). The scholarly diversity and richness of accounts on the rise of urban tourism show that the subject has been a major topic of intellectual concern for some time. Yet differences in theoretical orientation, methods, and analyti- cal techniques have led to alterative ways of conceptualizing tourism, assess- ing consequences, and delineating the effects of tourism on local culture.1

Few scholars have provided a theoretically sophisticated account of the diverse ways early 20th-century elites used tourism to transform space and engineer the post-Second World War growth of what George Ritzer (2005) calls the ‘means of consumption’ of corporate entertainment, theme parks, and retail chains. More rarely have scholars connected their empiri- cal work on tourism with a broader analysis of consumer culture and the rise of mass consumption. Indeed, the linkages between tourism, consump- tion, and consumer culture remain undertheorized and poorly understood. Scholarship lacks specificity in analyzing how and under what conditions tourism developed as a rationalized industry devoted to the aestheticization of local culture and the production of spaces of consumption, leisure, and entertainment.

This article uses a case study of New Orleans to illustrate the interplay of commodification and rationalization in the development of urban tourism. During the 19th century, the emergence of jazz music, the increased popularity of voodoo ceremonies and gaming, and the indelible Mardi Gras celebration contributed to projecting an image of New Orleans as a unique place with an individuality and authenticity of its own. Early, the emerging railroad industry, guidebook companies, and urban literary writers published a variety of tourist manuals, descriptive essays, and whim- sical pieces describing New Orleans as a crucible of cultural diversity and

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creativity (Boyer, 1994; Jackson, 1969: 23–4, 63, 255–7, 273–82). As I show, New Orleans’s image and reputation as a sui generis place was not some- thing that developed by fortuity or happenstance. By the late 19th century, the promotional material of local business leaders implied an evolving form of civic boosterism centered on attracting tourists and remaking the city into a landscape of consumption. In 1894, several hundred businessmen formed the Young Men’s Business League for the purpose of bringing ‘to the notice of the business world the material wealth of our city and its advantages for business, manufactures and residences’.2 By the turn of the century, more local businesses joined to create the New Orleans Progress- ive Union, an organization to entertain distinguished visitors to New Orleans. In 1913, the Union and the Young Men’s League merged with several other associations to form the New Orleans Association of Commerce.3 A year later, the Association joined the Chamber of Commerce of the United States. The Association of Commerce was the first organized group of business leaders in New Orleans to create a tourism and convention bureau, promote the city on a widespread scale, and encourage people to view the city as a collection of tourist attractions (Stanonis, 2006). Early New Orleans literary writers – Grace King, Kate Chopin, Lafcadio Hearn, Robert Tallant, George Washington Cable, William Coleman, Lyle Saxon, and others – facilitated the creation of a collective memory of New Orleans culture with deep historical roots in an amalgam of different people and groups. Yet it was the Association of Commerce that supplied the organizational structures, marketing strategies, and promotional efforts to disseminate this image on an international scale and link New Orleans with a fledgling mass tourism industry.

My case study of New Orleans addresses two major limitations in scholarship on the rise of urban tourism and consumer culture in early 20th century America. First, I maintain that early efforts to promote tourism emerged during the 20th century not as a linear transition or smooth progression from less developed patterns of urban promotion and booster- ism. Rather the development of tourism was uneven and chaotic, punctu- ated by periods of growth and prosperity as well as by severe crises and instability. The precariousness of industrial expansion and commercial transformation was marked by increasing anxiety and mobilization among business groups. During the 1910s, new business associations began forging networks with the emerging convention industry to transform tourism into a highly organized and rationalized set of enterprises, enabling people to consume specially prepared spaces. By the 1930s, a formal system of tourism infrastructure – hotels, sightseeing tours, travel bureaus, tourist information

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centers, tourist publications, a convention and visitors bureau and public- ity bureau located within the Association of Commerce, and so forth – had replaced the more piecemeal and unconnected services offered to visitors during the early 20th century. The development of tourism in New Orleans was intimately linked with the rationalization of place promotion activities and the commodification of indigenous products, cultures, and social relations. As two defining processes of consumer culture, the spread of commodification and rationalization presaged a new era whereby locally conceived social forms could be transformed into abstract and iconic images and symbols that could be used for the cross-promotion of diverse commodities (guidebooks, hotels, railroads, airlines, etc.). In the signifying act of the tourist advertisement, otherwise disconnected images could be transferred from one social activity and reference set to another. In this sense, the advertising of New Orleans as a tourist site became an import- ant and strategic device in the production of urban space.

Second, recent historical scholarship on the rise of tourism in the United States has focused on the role of consumer demand and individual travel preferences in the development of tourism venues and promotional activities during the late 19th and 20th centuries (Rothman, 2003; Shaffer, 2001). While these factors are important, they can obscure the powerful role of political and economic elites, coalitions of businessmen, and other organized interests in shaping and influencing tourists’ views of cities. As I show, the members of the committees of the Association of Commerce were urban imagineers – signifying agents – who helped fashion a ‘desti- nation image’ and worked diligently to influence the (re)presentation of the city to locals, businesses, and tourists. A destination image is a set of visual symbols and descriptors that provide visitors and residents with a trans- parent and recognizable local iconography for interpreting the cultural attractions of a city or destination. As a socially constructed cultural script, a destination image emerges from interactions among local actors, corpor- ations, and other economic and cultural interests linked through organiza- tions and network ties. I draw upon archival data, especially minutes of meetings of the Association of Commerce, to reveal the key actors, organ- ized interests, patterns of interaction, and important motivations underly- ing the elaboration and development of New Orleans’s ‘destination image’ and the early building of tourism in the city.4 The minutes of meetings of the bureaus, departments, and committees of the Association of Commerce are infused with a political messianism. Members viewed themselves as the civic guardians of New Orleans culture and they engaged in actions to create organizations and promotional strategies to ‘construct’ New Orleans

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as a place of leisure, entertainment, and consumption. The creation and stabilization of networks and organizational ties helped businessmen produce collective representations of New Orleans, and disseminate these representations to the world through the institutional channels of the emerging convention and advertising industries. The Association of Commerce was organized in a quasi-bureaucratic form with a flexible division of labor, a several-layered authority system, and a strong commit- ment to organizational continuity and goal achievement. This organiza- tional structure rationalized the process of symbol production while creating opportunities for the amplification of local culture on a global scale.

COMMODIFICATION, RATIONALIZATION, AND URBAN TOURISM Tourism stands at the nexus of the ‘distant’ processes of commodification and rationalization, and ‘local’ forces of territorial embeddedness and place particularity. Unlike other commodities that are bought and sold in markets, the tourism commodity and related services are spatially fixed and consumed at the place of production. At the same time, tourism is a set of extra-local practices and activities that are subject to the fluid dynamics and anarchic character of capital investment. It is this duality between localized and non-transportable products and distant and mobile capital that makes the study of tourism especially important for illuminating the rise of modern consumption practices. On the one hand, scholars have long conceptualized tourism as an extension of commodification that transforms indigenous places and cultures into saleable products that are devoid of authenticity (for example, see Boorstin, 1964; Britton, 1991; Debord, 1994; Watson and Kopachevsky, 1994). In Zygmunt Bauman’s (1998) work, tourism is a force of standardization that promotes the growth of extra- territoriality whereby ‘intra-planetary connections . . . stamp uniformity where connections would be, sameness over differences, uniformity over exchange’ (Franklin, 2003: 212). Other scholars have viewed tourism as a ‘local’ practice that nurtures the growth of indigenous identities and trans- mits expressive resources for localized cultural valorization (for example, see Coleman and Crang, 2003; Eade, 1997). Rather than viewing terms like the ‘distant’ and ‘local’ as binaries or independently given sets of phenomena, it is helpful to see them as existing in a dialectical, reciprocal, and interactive relationship. Such a perspective recognizes that distant processes like commodification and rationalization are articulated in everyday social behaviors and cultural practices in particular places at specific times. In this dynamic relationship, every local context involves its

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own appropriation and reworking of extra-local processes and influences, thus encouraging diversity and variety. Understanding tourism as an amalgam of both distant and local influences helps to shift analytically from the macro-level and accompanying abstract dimensions to the local, the specific, and the micro-level of everyday experience. Such a perspective adjudicates between a ‘top-down’ approach that stresses the role of distant forces and macrostructures in driving tourism, and a ‘bottom-up’ approach that focuses on the role of local influences and particularizing forces.

References to commodification and rationalization abound in recent studies of urban tourism, place marketing, and consumer culture. Commod- ification refers to the dominance of commodity exchange-value over use- value and implies the development of a consumer society where market relations subsume and govern social life. In the context of urban tourism, local customs, rituals, festivals, and ethnic arts become tourist attractions, performed for tourist consumption, and produced for market-based instru- mental activities (for overviews, see Gotham, 2002; Judd and Fainstein, 1999; Rath, 2007). Rationalization is a process whereby social actions and interactions become based on considerations of efficiency and calculation rather than on motivations derived from custom, tradition, or emotion. Max Weber (1968 [1921]; 1995 [1905]) used the concept formal rationality to explain the process by which the major institutions of the West became dominated by means-ends calculation guided by universally applied rules, laws, and regulations. Formal rationality is implemented most fully through bureaucratic organizations. Following other scholars such as Ritzer (2004) and Gottdiener (2000), I use the term rationalization to analyze the imple- mentation of formal procedures to enhance the efficiency, calculation, and predictability of producing tourism products, images, and spaces. Broadly, the commodification of local cultural products and the production of spaces of consumption could not take place without rationalized organiza- tions and institutions. Rational organizations provide a regulatory frame- work of rules, norms, and procedures in which the production and consumption of local culture and tourism-building take place. Codified procedures and rules also establish stable routines to localize and reproduce flows of capital, culture, images, and people. Commodification and rational- ization always appear on the same stage in each other’s company, and to speak of one is to imply the existence of the other. Thus, commodifica- tion and rationalization are not pre-given or independent categories but are uneven and historically changing processes that never reach any ultimate conclusion or completion.

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Commodification and rationalization are important for explaining the formation of structured webs of cultural meaning and significance that animate expressions and representations of urban identity in tourism promotion. Over the 20th century, the cultural meanings and significations that people in different places have assigned to local products, organizations, and other creations have been shaped by wider structures and processes of commodification and rationalization. The pioneering work of John Urry (2002), Stuart Ewen (1976), and William Leach (1993) draws attention to the rise of standardized factory production and mass advertising as central components in the development of a broad-based consumer capitalism with tourism as a form of rationalized leisure. In his oft-cited book, The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord (1994) developed the concept of the ‘spectacle’ to refer to the ‘historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life’ (p. 42) and images and symbols become commodity-spectacles. As the processes of commodification and rationalization spread through society, towns and cities increasingly re- organize themselves as exotic places for the consumption of culture and uniqueness, both for residents and tourists, a phenomenon described by Mark Gottdiener (2001), Richard Williams (2004), and Anne-Marie Broudehoux (2004). Every town and city, as David Harvey (1989: 13) notes, ‘has to appear as an innovative, exciting, creative, and safe place to live, play, and consume. Spectacle and display [become] the symbols of [a] dynamic community.’ These perspectives are important for drawing attention to how tourism framings of local culture, history, and identities spring from an interplay of signification and interpretation that are structured by a plethora of intersecting rules, codes, formal organizations, and rationalized procedures. While localized cultural invention and interpretation are based on people’s negotiation of shared cultural meanings, these meanings are neither spontaneously created nor structurally determined. Structures, organizations, and processes constrain choices, enable decision-making, and provide opportunities and symbolic resources to forge some kinds of cultural meanings rather than others.

Many scholars acknowledge the rise and development of urban tourism during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but they disagree over its form, impact, and trajectory. Cocks (2001) attributes the growth of urban tourism to increasing and more affordable transportation, rising middle-class income, and the development of new urban hotels. Sears (1989) maintains that the rise of American tourist attractions during the 19th century assumed the function of ‘sacred places’ for affirming a national collective identity and a broad cultural sensibility. Reflecting Sears’s cultural

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approach, Shaffer (2001: 6) argues that tourism operated to forge a modern American cultural identity: ‘both the production of the tourist landscape and the consumption of the tourist experience [were] central to the development of a nascent national cultural in the United States’. These diverse accounts offer broad insight into the connections between tourism and consumer culture, and the role of consumer demand in stimulating travel. Yet, at the same time, this scholarship is less helpful in explaining the uneven development of tourism, analyzing how and under what conditions tourism emerged in major cities, and identifying how tourism became intertwined with mass consumption. Just as racial and ethnic interactions and relations, social conflicts, and the nature of work varied from place to place, the emergence of urban tourism reflected local idiosyncrasies, local histories, and indigenous practices in the making of urban culture and place. More important, situational and contextual factors specific to each city under study complicate cross-city generalizations about tourism and consumption. As far as tourism is an expression of larger processes and socio-economic relationships, the development of tourism in any particu- lar city will express the particularities of the place in the making of its urban space. In short, place matters in the study of tourism because an analysis of why and how tourism develops will need to take into account where (and when) it develops.

URBAN TOURISM AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF A DESTINATION IMAGE Scholars have noted that a city’s ‘destination image’ comprises a distinct set of iconic representations and cultural symbols that people associate with a particular locale. The destination image is a visual cue that acts as both an attraction for potential tourists and as a cultural framework for authenticat- ing tourists’ experiences once they arrive in the city. Jane Desmond’s (1999) examination of Hawaii’s destination image locates the construction of the female hula dancer in the circulation of visual and verbal representations that romanticized 19th-century representations of ‘natives’ to sell a pleasur- able image and experience to tourists. Mimi Sheller’s (2003) study of tourism consumption in the Caribbean and Michael Dawson’s (2004) historical analysis of consumer culture and tourism in British Columbia suggest that destination images are constructed not only from publicity materials but also from other forms of representation, including fashion, cuisine, urban literary descriptions, historical narratives, music, and news stories. While most scholars agree that destination images are ‘constructed’, there is much disagreement over how organizations and institutions shape the production of a destination image, how past actions and choices

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constrain and/or enable the process of destination image creation, and how powerful actors fabricate and deploy cultural themes to legitimize their own interpretations of the destination image. Creating and (re)producing a destination image and assorted urban symbols requires an institutional system or set of formal organizations. Institutions and organizations create the rules, routines, and structures that shape how tourism markets and destination images develop, how actors present and arrange symbols to persuade people to invest in and travel to cities, and how actors develop promotional strategies.

The early construction of a New Orleans as a tourist destination is connected to several major developments that link the process of destina- tion image construction with the rise of mass tourism: the rise of literary writers, guidebooks, and the mass media; and the actions of the New Orleans Association of Commerce. In his book, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918, Stephen Kern (1983: 34) explains how, in the 19th century, communication, transportation and the growth of journalism made it possible for more people to read about distant places in the newspaper, see them in magazines and movies, and travel more widely. As human consciousness expanded across time and space, people could not help noticing that in different places there were vastly different customs. While attention to transportation and communication technologies is important for understanding the increasing rapidity and velocity of flows of travel, it is less helpful in explaining the conditions under which different cities mobilized their cultural attributes to develop different destination images to attract capital and consumers. As Cocks (2001) has noted, descriptions of cities contained in tourist guides published by hotels, railroads, and other travel interests were sites on which various social groups, institutions, and ideologies struggled over the definition and construction of urban reality. Understanding the construction of destination images means focusing analytical attention on identifying the institutional relations linking macro- processes and social actors in the development of modern tourism. Such an approach calls for greater attention to the complex and nuanced ways that destination images emerge from interactions among national and local actors connected through organizations and network ties.

THE ROLE OF LITERARY WRITERS, GUIDEBOOK PUBLISHERS, AND THE MASS MEDIA One way rational organizational forms and commodity images of places and cultures became enmeshed in the emerging consumer culture of urban America was through the ideas and representations purveyed by urban

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literary writers and guidebook publishers. Throughout the 19th century, architectural guidebooks, local storybooks, cookbooks, and a variety of visitor guides published by Benjamin Moore Norman (1845), J. Curtis Waldo (1879), and William H. Coleman (1885), among others, contained descriptions of New Orleans; identified a variety of local myths; celebrated the city’s cultural expressions, customs and traditions; and included songs, recipes, and collective memories. New Orleans’s first guidebook, Norman’s New Orleans and Environs, a 223-page book published by Benjamin Moore Norman in 1845, offered itself as a ‘historical sketch of the Territory and State of Louisiana and the City of New Orleans, from the earliest period to the present time: presenting a complete guide’. J. Curtis Waldo, a local publisher and photo-engraver, issued his Illustrated Visitors’ Guide to New Orleans in 1879, featuring tourist highlights along with prominent busi- nesses (and businessmen), institutions, and organizations of the day. In the ten years he was in New Orleans, from 1877 to 1888, Lafcadio Hearn published hundreds of descriptions of New Orleans that appeared in the New Orleans Daily Item and Times-Democrat, Harper’s Weekly, and Scribner’s Magazine.5 The prolific writings of Hearn complemented a plethora of stories about New Orleans written by George Washington Cable that were published nationwide in the popular Century Magazine.

The spread of newspapers, guidebooks, magazines, and other media helped popularize and disseminate an image of New Orleans as a city of romance, uplifting culture, and architectural splendor. Specifically, the ingre- dients of New Orleans in destination image included French and Spanish architecture, Creole culture, the Vieux Carre (French Quarter), Mardi Gras, Les Coulisses (French Opera), beautiful oak trees, Spanish moss, voodoo, cities of the dead (above-ground cemeteries), and scenes of romance and mystery. Later writers such as Grace Elizabeth King (1895, 1932), Robert Tallant (1948), and Lyle Saxon (1928) would elaborate on these resonant themes and amplify them to build a veritable cornucopia of culture materials to lure tourists to the city.

The invention of photography helped support the expansion of a vast literature on American cities, through booster literature, travel sketches, guidebooks, tourism itineraries, and other illustrated brochures of cities and urban life (Cocks, 2001; Shaffer, 2001). Photography enabled travelers to transcribe reality visually, thus providing a motivation for people to visit exotic places and capture images and experiences on film.6 Early visitor guides were organizers and transmitters of cultural information that reflected as well as created public opinion about cities. Railroad, hotel, and other emerging travel industries, in turn, adapted and reshaped images of

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cities to stimulate desire to travel and thereby create a market for their products and services. In a section titled ‘Why We Travel’, a Rand McNally guidebook published for the 1884 World’s Fair in New Orleans declared that people travel to ‘find constant pleasure and profitable interests over every mile’. Juxtaposing ‘pleasure and profit’ connected with a narrative strategy of extracting, reducing, and recombining iconic representations of New Orleans to construct and project an image of the city as place of amusement. To ‘fix salient points in the mind’, the guidebook instructed visitors to take a notebook and ‘write out condensed memoranda of what you learn. It will assist you in memorizing and photographing on the mind what you acquire.’ The Rand McNally guidebook drew a sharp distinction between ‘a time of labor’ and a ‘time for recreation’, noting that visitors who travel to New Orleans ‘will come back refreshed and enlightened from what they have seen and learned’.7 In the 19th century, the advertising work of railroad companies and guidebook publishers complemented and embellished the place-making work of George Washington Cable, Lafcadio Hearn,William H. Coleman, and other New Orleans writers to frame social conditions, assign meaning to New Orleans, and thereby organize tourist experience. The partial and selective descriptions of the city deployed by these and other literary writers coupled with the appearance of undeviat- ing candor and credibility helped supply an interpretive schema that could act as an attraction for potential tourists.

By the 20th century, the image-building of urban writers, journalists, and guidebook publishers reflected and supported an emerging system of urban promotion led by magazines, music, silent films, motion pictures, radio, and later, television. Recording and radio made it possible to project music over time and space and introduce people around the world to New Orleans jazz (Raeburn, 2002). The transmission of cultural images and symbols about the city received an added boost with the development of silent films. In 1912, George Klein, Samuel Long, and Frank Morton founded the Kalem Company, and began to produce silent films using New Orleans as a setting. During its first year, the company produced The Belle of New Orleans, Girl Strikers, The Pilgrimage, Mardi Gras Mix-up, Bucktown Romance, and The Darling of the C.S.A. (Rosendahl, 1984). Later, the advent of television and motion pictures encouraged the theatrical stereotyping of New Orleans, creating a symbolic reality colored by the selective interpret- ations of producers and writers. Cinema, motion pictures, and television superimposed a ‘visual city’ on the ‘built city’, creating a narrative map of familiarity and coherence in place of complexity and variety. Movies like Streetcar Named Desire with Marlon Brando, Louisiana Purchase with Bob

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Hope, King Creole with Elvis Presley, and many others, presented slices of authenticity to reinforce and accentuate certain stereotypes while creating for each viewer a private impression of New Orleans. Overall, the (re)presentation of urban life and culture in visitors’ guides and mass media transmitted ideas about New Orleans to a broad audience, thus captivating attention and nurturing people’s understandings of the city and its people. The discourse and imagery contained in visitors’ guides, literary depictions, movies, and television made it possible for more people to visually consume representations of New Orleans and to imagine what it would be like to travel to the city.

The above points draw attention to the centrality of literary writers, guidebook publishers, and the mass media as institutions that appropriate and transform otherwise mundane and ordinary images, symbols, and experiences into spectacle and fantasy. For Guy Debord (1994), an essen- tial part of contemporary society is the vast commercial effort to ‘spectac- ularize’ the world through the production of commodity-images as ruled by the logic and dictates of commodified media culture. For Ritzer (2005), consumer society is dominated by the process of ‘re-enchantment’ by which various entertainment firms, theme parks, and other enterprises use spectacles and simulations to seduce people into consuming more commodities. These points reflect a long-standing sociological concern in explaining cultural phenomena and meaning-creation in terms of actors, organizations, structures, and processes. In every society, as Bourdieu (1984 [1979]) noted, cultural objects are located within complex systems and organizations that are created and reproduced through social interaction among people. This argument also dovetails with Baudrillard (1998 [1973]: 79–80), who argues that processes of cultural production provide a code that people use to construct and reconstruct cultural identities and meanings through the exchange of commodities: ‘The circulation, purchase, sale, appropriation of differentiated goods and signs/objects today constitute our language, our code, that code which the entire society communicates and converses.’ In the case of New Orleans, a variety of corporations and organizations appropriated different components of urban culture using rational techniques of image production. Processes of commodification and rationalization assisted in abstracting New Orleans ‘culture’ from local contexts of interaction and meaning-making. Once converted into an abstract and auto-referential image, culture was put into the service of the commodification process and repackaged and sold in a variety of market-based forms (tourist guides, books, magazines, movies, and exotic stories). By the 1920s and 1930s, visual and verbal

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representations of New Orleans had been commodified in pictures, post- cards, and advertisements to supply potential visitors with an inexhaustible repertoire of pleasurable experiences, a development that both reflected and legitimized the development of a rationalized tourism industry.

THE ROLE OF THE NEW ORLEANS ASSOCIATION OF COMMERCE The mobilization of businessmen and the creation of the New Orleans Association of Commerce in 1913 represent a major turning point in the development and elaboration of New Orleans’s destination image. We can view the Association as a major agent linking the processes of commodi- fication and rationalization with the local actions of economic elites in the institutionalization of a destination image, and the establishment of a local tourism industry. During the first two decades of the 20th century, the Association created over a dozen internal bureaus, committees, and depart- ments to support inward investment, lobby city and state governments in support of business-friendly legislation, collect data on demographic and population trends, and represent the commercial interests of members.8

The establishment of a Convention and Visitors’ Bureau (CVB) and a Publicity Bureau in the years after 1915 laid the institutional foundation for disseminating New Orleans’s destination image through organized promotional activities and network connections with national and inter- national tourism organizations. Hierarchical organization and routinized network ties helped stabilize and structure relationships to harness commodity flows and create new circuits of representation, including news stories, photographs, songs, nostalgic descriptions, literary narratives, cuisine, and so forth. More important, networked relationships provided for the creation and transmission of cultural knowledge about New Orleans, and the mobilization of capital and resources for early tourism- building. The CVB established the Greater New Orleans Hotel and Lodging Association in 1924 and the New Orleans Restaurant Men’s Association in 1931, two major developments that facilitated the building of an alliance to represent the interests of restaurants and hotels and provide for regularized interaction and cooperation within the emerging tourism industry.9 In 1930, the CVB was accepted for membership in the International Association of Convention and Visitors Bureaus (IACVB) and thus, according to the Association of Commerce, ‘attained national recognition as the official Convention and Tourist Bureau of the City of New Orleans’.10

From the turn of the century through the Second World War, the CVB and the Publicity Bureau played strategic roles in systematizing the process

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of attracting, planning, and organizing conventions in an effort to undercut other cities in the competitive race to gain tourism investment. From the early 20th century onward, city after city established convention bureaus including Detroit (1895), Honolulu (1902), Atlantic City (1908), Denver (1909), Atlanta (1913), Minneapolis (1927), Washington, DC (1931), Cleveland (1934), New York City (1935), Philadelphia (1942), and Chicago (1943) (Flynn and Flynn, 1996). In these and other cities, CVBs designed their promotions and advertising to enhance predictability and reduce uncertainty in the decision-making calculus. Early on, the Association of Commerce recognized that attracting conventions ‘is about the most effective form of advertising we could possibly have’ and is ‘tantamount to selling New Orleans on a wholesale scale’.11 Members argued that the systematization of promotional efforts was a logical and rational means of doing business to benefit the entire city. Though all members were of a similar class background to businessmen and entrepreneurs, different coali- tions of interest cut across class boundaries within the organization. Almost from the beginning, Association members disagreed on whether the CVB should be led by hotel owners with specific interests in attracting mainly conventioneers, or whether the bureau should contain a broad representa- tion of business owners such as retail merchants and others interested in bringing diverse kinds of visitors to New Orleans. The routinization of action within a CVB and Publicity Bureau helped actors cultivate a cogni- tive framework within which to interact and construct meanings about New Orleans, engage in strategic and long-range tourism planning, troubleshoot present problems in light of past actions, and forecast future developments.

Members of the Association of Commerce recognized the fierce competition of attracting visitors and struggled to build networks and organizations to entice conventions to the city. Yet the volatile currents of social unrest and economic instability unleashed by the First World War, the Great Depression in the 1930s, and the Second World War hampered elite efforts to attract visitors and build tourism institutions. New Orleans’s famed Mardi Gras krewes (organizations that plan and stage parades) cancelled their parades during the First World War, the first ever mass cancellation of the Mardi Gras season. It was not until the 1920s that the four major krewes – Comus, Momus, Rex, and Proteus – returned to the streets to host their parades. During the Great Depression, the Carnival schedule shrunk to only three parades as lack of money forced Momus to cancel its parades from 1933 through 1936. In 1932, the Annual Report from the CVB lamented that ‘the stringency of the economic situation’

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has ‘had a most militating effect upon our efforts . . . to secure a steady flow of desirable and profitable conventions for New Orleans’.12 The ‘world strife’ of the Second World War resulted in a ‘turbulent and trou- blous year of 1940’, according to the CVB.13 The number of visitors to Louisiana plummeted during the crisis of the Second World War, from 391,372 in 1940, to 82,606 in 1945, and only 12,000 in 1946.14 The downturn in the number of visitors, conventions and attendance during the Second World War also reflects federal restrictions imposed by the Office of Defense Transportation (ODT) that banned conventions except those that helped the war effort. The federal government also required the conversion of tourist camps into military camps.15 By 1944, the ODT required meetings of more than 50 participants to apply for authoriza- tion. Around the nation, up to one-third of all convention and visitors’ bureaus discontinued their activities, and another third reduced their offer- ings (Flynn and Flynn, 1996). Even after the Second World War, the CVB primarily sought small conventions for the city due to a limited amount of convention space and a lack of hotel rooms to accommodate large conventions.

In general, the political instability of world wars and the Great Depression portended a new era of seemingly chronic instability and volatile transformation for New Orleans and other cities. As the Great Depression spread, it created persistent mass unemployment, devastated whole communities, and generated an upsurge of protest. As in other cities, the unemployment rate in New Orleans peaked at 25 percent and only gradually declined after the early 1930s. Compounding this problem was the fragile New Orleans economy that was dominated by the port industry and the oil industry, two industries extremely vulnerable to periodic down- turns in the national and global economy. Despite being a center of trade and commerce, New Orleans never developed a high-wage manufacturing sector or textile industry. Most of the city’s industrial activity was limited to cotton production and trade, sugar refineries, tobacco factories, coffee, and businesses catering to the local market.16 Anxieties about the uncertain place of New Orleans in the changing US economy and society fueled debate and contestation over the future of the city while creating oppor- tunities for elites to reinvent the city and to (re)present urban culture as a theatrical spectacle. For New Orleans during the first half of the 20th century, local elites working through the Association of Commerce attempted to control the discourse of urban place-making and promotion, legitimate tourism expansion, and define urban culture in the language of the commodity-spectacle.

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An approximation of the size, complexity, and specialization of the New Orleans’s tourism sector can be gauged from Table 1, which lists the number of hotels and motels; tourist camps, homes, and courts; amusement places; sightseeing tours; travel bureaus and tourist information centers; and museums from the early 20th century to 1950. These figures come from listings in New Orleans phone books for the given years. The table provides a general indicator of growth in the number, differentiation, and special- ization of tourism facilities. Before the 1920s, tourism promotion was relatively ad hoc and uncoordinated. The few hotels in the city and the lack of amusement places, sightseeing tours, and other tourism facilities suggest that tourism was not a rationalized and distinctive set of activities. Although different interests and actors advertised New Orleans as a tourist destina- tion, this was not carried out on any systematic and routinized basis. Moreover, lack of capital financing and low levels of tourism flows dis- couraged large-scale tourism investment and commercial development in the city. In addition, we can see from the table the precariousness and unevenness of tourism development as the number of amusement places plummeted after the beginning of the Great Depression, and the number of sightseeing tours and travel bureaus dropped after the US entered the Second World War. Almost all categories registered major increases in the five years after the end of the war in 1945.

CITY OF PROGRESS, ROMANCE, AND UNIQUENESS The mobilization for the First and Second World Wars, and the prolonged economic instability caused by the Great Depression, threatened the fortunes of economic elites and created a sense of political crisis among leaders with interests in promoting tourism and attracting conventions. Confronted with socio-economic uncertainty and unpredictability, members of the Association of Commerce mobilized to establish and insti- tutionalize a series of interconnected networks with railroad companies, hotels, national book publishers, newspapers, and magazines to expand the repertoire of urban place promotion and control the process of tourism- building. As information disseminators, the CVB and the Publicity Bureau produced and supplied photographs, tourist guides, booklets, special articles, and other general publicity to travel editors, columnists, automobile clubs, magazines, and tourist information centers around the world. During the 1920s, the Association began publishing and disseminating a weekly digest, titled New Orleans is Growing, of news items showing the progress and development of the city to hundreds of ‘interested publishers, editors, correspondents, advertising agents, and individuals known to be interested

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in New Orleans’. Importantly, the CVB established procedures to assist ‘visiting newspapermen, radiomen, writers and photographers while visiting New Orleans, in most cases escorting them around the city, working with them, so that they may see New Orleans through “our” eyes’.17

Through its various formal connections and cooperative agreements with firms and tourism boosters, the Association embraced a holistic approach of doing ‘everything possible to get favorable publicity for New Orleans from the business, industrial, and tourist viewpoints in travel magazines, convention organs, trade and business publications, financial and business pages of newspapers’.18 What is important is that promotional networks were not only structures of communication but were conduits of resources and information exchange that served as a basis of collective action. Through the creation of different network forms, the Association was guided by a logic of commodification and rationalization of image production. To enhance the building of a tourism infrastructure and attract capital investment, the Association and its bureaus designed routines to clarify goals, reduce the uncertainty of place promotion, and identify opportunities to stimulate consumer demand to visit the city.

The growth and extension of networks between the bureaus of the Association of Commerce and other corporations and tourism interests helped encourage the formation of synergistic promotional opportunities and corporate tie-ins to expand and legitimate the commodity form. One of the first international publicity efforts involved making contact with the commercial firm of Thomas Cook and Sons, a company that pioneered the packaged tour and day excursions (Cocks, 2001: 110–16; Urry, 2002: 23–4, 46, 86, 138, 148). According to a July 1921 report, the Bureau ‘distrib- uted about 3000 pieces of literature advertising New Orleans . . . not only in all parts of the United States but also in several foreign lands through the tourist services of Thomas Cook and Sons, and commercial exchanges’.19 Organizational ties with the Cook company combined with other international promotional efforts fueled the production of tourist images of New Orleans and provided a rationale for identifying and creating additional media outlets to advertise the city. In June 1924, the Publicity Bureau reported that it sent 4000 pieces of printed matter to London for distribution at the New Orleans Advertising Club’s conven- tion.20 In 1927, the CVB was proclaiming itself ‘as the clearing house for matters having to do with advertising to the nation and world at large, the progress, possibilities, and attractions of the city’.21 The February 1932 Report noted that the CVB ‘effected an arrangement with the American Express Company as a medium through which literature on New Orleans

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would be distributed to agencies of the company in foreign countries’.22

A year later, at the 1933 ‘Century of Progress’World Exposition in Chicago, the Association of Commerce opened an office at 334 S. Michigan Avenue ‘to develop increased tourist interest’ in New Orleans.23 According to the Annual Report of the CVB, the office ‘was the only representative New Orleans and Louisiana had in Chicago during the Exposition’ and ‘attracted thousands of people from every section of the country and abroad, and as a result, we are in position to know that a considerable volume of visitor business was and will be directed to New Orleans’.24

As the above points suggest, structured patterns of interaction and information exchange between the bureaus of the Association and other organizations allowed for the systematization of cross-promotional activi- ties and the institutionalization of the destination image. This rationaliza- tion process also involved the representation and production of culture as an object of visual consumption. In 1924, the Publicity Bureau adopted and broadcast weekly slogans ‘emphasizing various phases of New Orleans business . . . for use on letters, published newspapers, and . . . generally for publicity purposes’. These slogans included, for example, ‘New Orleans – The South’s Greatest City’ (14 January), ‘New Orleans – America’s Most Interesting City’ (4 February), ‘New Orleans – City of Progress’ (4 May), ‘New Orleans – City of Romance’ (18 May), among several dozen other slogans.25 What is important is that these and other slogans were carefully crafted and adopted by the Association of Commerce to ‘construct’ New Orleans, and to imprint different images of the city on the world’s consciousness. Members of the Association attempted to make New Orleans attractive and accessible to the imagination by simplifying and reducing the city to a set of spectacular images and slogans. The Associ- ation recognized that the use of slogans, combined with other visual images of the city, could be effective tools in putting the city on the tourist’s mental map. Sloganeering dovetailed with the tendencies of urban boosters to demystify New Orleans by signposting sights and sites as worthy of meaning and significance. Broadly, the members and staff of the Association not only positioned themselves as image-makers but also as storytellers who translated New Orleans into a place of unique authenticity, economic progress, and romance. In the 1930s and later, the Publicity Bureau prepared at least 40 ‘canned’ stories about New Orleans that it sent to magazine editors and newspapers for their use. Declaring New Orleans as ‘one of the three outstanding “story” cities in this country’, the Association produced stories such as ‘Historic New Orleans’, ‘Port of New Orleans’, ‘Modern New Orleans’, and other topics covering cemeteries, antiques, recreation,

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courtyards, monuments, old homes, streets, museums, and other stories. The Publicity Bureau even turned otherwise mundane topics such as ‘Spanish moss’, the city’s ‘drainage system’, ‘water supply’, ‘bridges’, and ‘spillways’ into extraordinary and spectacular ‘stories’ of interest.26

The mass production of entertaining stories and images of New Orleans not only exemplifies the rationalization of place promotion but illustrates the establishment and institutionalization of information exchange networks within the city government to entice people to travel to consume local culture and heritage. In the 1940s, the New Orleans Public Service, an advertising agency supported by the city government and the State of Louisiana, published leaflets and travel sketches about New Orleans to persuade people to travel to the city.27 The agency also purchased advertising space in many high-profile newspapers and maga- zines such as The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Time Magazine, Newsweek Magazine, and others to promote the unique attractions of New Orleans.28 Together, the New Orleans Association of Commerce and the city government became major drivers of tourism development and power agents of information transmission. The annual amount of printed matter distributed by the Association of Commerce increased from 20,000 items in 1921, to 200,000 in 1927, and 434,000 in 1937.29 This vast increase reflects technological innovations in print and visual media, the cultivation of new contacts with advertisers and journalists, and the rationalization of producing and disseminating material about New Orleans. As an industry coordinator, the New Orleans Association of Commerce united diverse businesses – hotels and motels, restaurants, airlines, travel agencies, and so on – into a loosely organized network where actors could interact, identify goals, and engage in strategic tourism planning. Working with different tourism interests, the Association of Commerce carefully crafted and deployed a variety of slogans, themes, and motifs to ‘construct’ New Orleans, to imprint different images of the city on the world’s conscious- ness, and to ‘sell’ New Orleans to the world.

In addition, relationships between the Association of Commerce and the rising mass tourism industry accumulated into a network containing a repository of information about New Orleans to enhance the commercial value of the city and region. The combination of rational organization and sophisticated promotional strategies enabled actors to cultivate an image of New Orleans as an enchanted place worth visiting and doing business in and to project this image on a global scale. Moreover, the high level of rationality exhibited by the Association of Commerce suggests that the CVB and the Publicity Bureau were not responding to consumer demand

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per se, but were, to a large extent, proactive in stimulating and enhancing consumer desires. Reflecting broad changes in urban culture and consump- tion during the early 20th century, the Association was not content to react to the uncertainties of consumer demand. Indeed, the minutes of meetings of the Association of Commerce are clear that members acted strategically and methodically to formulate promotional strategies to entice, mold, and channel consumer choices to travel to New Orleans and ‘experience’ the city. John Urry’s (1995: 132; 2002) concept of the ‘tourist gaze’ suggests that tourism is about the consumption of exotic ‘experiences’ where ‘places are chosen to be gazed upon because there is anticipation, especially through day-dreaming and fantasy, of intense pleasures, either on a different scale or involving a different sense from those customarily encountered’. The Association’s promotional strategies to create consumable ‘experiences’ reflected and reinforced a market-driven conception of urban culture as ruled by dictates of mass advertising and bureaucratic rationality. ‘Every convention at which we put on a campaign results in creating a desire on the part of a large number of people, who possess the means, to visit New Orleans, according to the CVB.’30 Similarly, a 1937 Annual Report stated:

Contrary to the opinion prevailing in the minds of many of our citizens and businessmen, conventions simply do not gravitate naturally to New Orleans because our city is popular and desirable. We are one favorite convention center of the nation among some forty or more others in this country, competing with other foreign capitals. . . . The campaign demands to secure conventions are insistent that the Bureau and its executive staff be constantly alert and active in behalf of maintaining the position and desires of New Orleans before the influential spirits of convention organizations which are prospects for the City. You all know the story of convention development. Some groups must be followed for years before they are ripened to the point of becoming New Orleans conscious. All must be sought from one to three years before they are secured. A lapse of an interval often breaks the chain and throws years of effort and expense to the winds.31

The reference to multi-year efforts to make conventions and consumers ‘New Orleans conscious’ is repeated throughout the 1930s and 1940s in the monthly and annual reports of the CVB. The staff and members of the CVB attempted to structure the desires of potential conventioneers and tourists by providing a range of slogans, images, and other representations

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and promoting these intensively. What is important is that neither aggre- gate consumer desires nor visitor demand were given, pre-existing factors that explain the development of tourism in New Orleans. Members of the Association of Commerce actively worked to shape, influence, and control preferences and travel motivations through their advertising and publicity efforts. Stuart Ewen (1976: 25–6) has suggested that during the early decades of the 20th century, the pressure of industrial competition compelled business elites to organize their businesses ‘not merely around the production of goods, but around the creation of a buying public’. The above points suggest that the rationalization and expansion of tourism as a mass phenomenon was intimately connected with the creation of this ‘buying public’. Anticipating later developments in mass advertising and niche marketing, the positive images projected by the tourism companies interpreted New Orleans’s history and culture, and imparted to the tourist what to do, where to go, and how to feel. In this way, mass advertising and rationalized production of tourism images of New Orleans and other cities helped fuel the commodification of local culture while bureaucratic procedures were essential to priming consumer desires to travel to distant cities to consume exotic cultures.

CONCLUSION In this article I have identified the key actors and organized interests involved in formulating promotional strategies, networks, and formal organizations to cultivate a destination image and to build a nascent tourism infrastructure in New Orleans. For decades, scholars have viewed tourism as a set of discrete economic activities or a spatially bounded locality that is subject to external forces producing impacts. In contrast, I have concep- tualized tourism as a set of practices and institutions involved in the rationalization of place promotion and the reframing of local culture as consumption-based entertainment experiences. The rise of mass tourism during the early 20th century reflected and reinforced an emerging view of cities as places of amusement, fascination, and exoticism. New forms of urban representation including photography, visitors’ guides, and literary descriptions of New Orleans nurtured an embryonic destination image while hotels, railroads, and other travel interests operated as communication networks to disseminate local images, symbols, and motifs to a national and international audience. By the early 20th century, the rising mass media of radio, silent film, and magazines had become significant social forces in forming and delimiting public assumptions, attitudes, and views of New Orleans. In the 1920s and later, the Association of Commerce helped

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inaugurate a new era of specialized place promotion and tourism develop- ment that aimed to reorganize New Orleans into a ‘landscape of consump- tion’ (Ritzer, 2005), a process that would be further rationalized in the decades after the Second World War. Indeed, the ability to create and deploy selective and partial images of New Orleans through tourism and adver- tising media became a new form of urban representation and reality construction. The Association of Commerce employed rational organiz- ation to localize distant capital flows, commodify images of New Orleans, and transmit local information to far-away places through network ties with corporations. Rational organizations not only streamlined the process of image production but opened up new avenues and opportunities for consuming cultures and places.

My study of place promotion in New Orleans provides insight into the important role played by tourism in helping to support the rise of mass consumption and the development of a broad-based consumer culture in the United States. Local economic elites borrowed from a rich cornucopia of cultural materials to produce and disseminate a destination image that would facilitate the modern creation of what Don Slater (1997) calls a ‘consuming self ’ and what Steven Miles and Malcolm Miles (2004) call ‘consuming cities’. As a means of consuming culture and space, tourism practices and discourses helped construct both the consuming subject and the idea that cities should be seen as places of visual consumption (e.g., sites of ‘history’, ‘culture’, and ‘otherness’). As discussed, the New Orleans Association of Commerce appropriated, organized, and disseminated symbols, images, and motifs of New Orleans that had been popularized during the 19th century by urban literary writers, journalists, and guide- book publishers. Images of New Orleans as a place of unique architecture, the Vieux Carre, creole culture, Mardi Gras, Les Coulisses, voodoo, cities of the dead, and romance and mystery were the cultural raw material that fed the commodification process and became the major elements of the destination image. Against the backdrop of intensified urban competition for conventions and visitors, the members of the Association of Commerce labored to create and routinize a set of tourism practices to pin-point the destination image, focus global attention on New Orleans, and channel and direct consumer desires to visit the city to consume the markers of local culture. In this sense, the Association of Commerce became a major organization of aesthetic production that provided both symbolic and material resources to engineer the development of a rationalized tourism infrastructure. The rationalization of symbol production and the culti- vation of sophisticated promotional strategies transmitted imagery and

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interpretive schemes, thereby connecting the city and region with a rising consumer culture.

My analysis suggests that the early development of tourism had an elective affinity with the transformation of urban culture into an abstract image or commodity-spectacle. As I have pointed out, the Association of Commerce helped legitimate an emerging conception of urban culture as an object of visual consumption, a conception that reflected broader transformations in the political economy of consumer capitalism. One characteristic of early place-promotion activities was the growing emphasis placed on commodity display, entertainment, and amusement as central components of urban life. In Land of Desire, William Leach (1993: xiii) described the rise of consumer capitalism during the late 19th century and early 20th century as a ‘future-oriented culture of desire that confused the good life with goods’. By the end of the 19th century, according to Leach, the ‘cardinal features’ of the rising consumer culture were ‘acquisition and consumption as the means of achieving happiness; the cult of the new; the democratization of desire, and money value as the predominant measure of all value in society’ (p. xiii). Like other business organizations and chambers of commerce in other cities, New Orleans’s social elites and their organizations played key roles in generat- ing and supporting the development of mass consumption by presenting culture, traditions, and customs as objects of consumption. The images of New Orleans presented through the signifying work of the Association of Commerce were hypostatized descriptions that reflected profiteering motives, including a desire to celebrate travel and expand the commodity form. Over the course of the 20th century, the local elites would estab- lish sophisticated networks and synergies with transnational hotel firms and entertainment chains to further rationalize the production of urban imagery and transform the metropolitan area into a major site of tourist consumption.

Notes 1. In their edited volume, C. Michael Hall, Allan M. Williams, and Alan A. Lew

assert that the field of tourism has been ‘substantially criticized in terms of its theoretical base’ (Hall et al., 2004: 14). Kevin Meethan (2001: 2) maintains that ‘for all the evident expansion of journals, books and conferences specifically devoted to tourism, at a general analytical level it remains under-theorized’. Likewise, in criticizing the tendency within tourism studies to ‘internalize industry led priorities and perspectives’, Adrian Franklin and Mike Crang (2001: 5) argue that conventional tourism scholarship does ‘not include the tools necessary to analyze and theorize the complex cultural and social processes that

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have unfolded’ over the decades. For an overview of theoretical debates in urban tourism, see Fainstein et al. (2003).

2. Young Men’s Business League of New Orleans (n.d.) New Orleans of 1894: Its Advantages, Its Conditions, and Its Prospects. Howard Tilton Memorial Library, Jones Hall, Louisiana Collection. Vertical file:’Descriptions, New Orleans, 1880 – 1899.’ New Orleans, LA.

3. In 1950, the Association of Commerce changed its name to the Chamber of Commerce of the New Orleans Area.‘Chamber History’ (n.d.) box 652, folder #5, MS 66. Chamber of Commerce of the New Orleans Area. University of New Orleans.

4. The main primary sources in this article are the reports, analyses, and minutes of meetings of the Chamber of Commerce of the New Orleans Area. In addition to examining published material and reports of the many committees, bureaus, and departments of the Chamber, I accessed minutes of every meeting of the Convention and Visitors’ Bureau and the Publicity Bureau from the 1910s through 1979 (the last year on record). The collection is located at the University of New Orleans and the manuscript number is 66.

5. For an overview of Lafcadio Hearn’s writings, see Starr (2001). 6. On the significance of photography for tourism, see Urry (2002: 128–9). As

Brown (2005) has noted, the rise and popularization of photography was a major technological force that modern corporations appropriated to consolidate corporate power and rationalize commercial culture. For Brown, photography was ‘structured by the economic, while at the same time working to naturalize capitalism at the level of ideology’ (p. 16). These points dovetail with the work of Nye (1985) and Marchand (1997), who draw attention to the ideological role that photographic images and advertisements played in the development of consumer markets and workplace rationalization schemes. Even more important, photography allowed people to visually represent urban reality at one fixed point in time and space. This new mode of representation, in turn, valorized the notion of cities as having distinctive ‘personalities’ that could be interpreted through film and visual imagery (Cocks, 2001).

7. Rand, McNally and Company (1885) The World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition at New Orleans, pp. 8–9, 14–15. Chicago: Rand, McNally. Howard Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University, Jones Hall. Louisiana Collection.

8. In 1917, for example, the Association contained a Board of Directors (14 members), a Members Council (22 members), and the following bureaus, each with a chairman, vice chairman, and several committees: Civic Bureau; Industrial Bureau; Wholesale Merchants and Manufacturers Bureau; Foreign Trade Bureau; Legislation and Taxation Bureau; Traffic and Transportation Bureau; Retail Merchants Bureau; Good Roads Bureau; Publicity, Convention and Tourist Bureau; Agricultural, Reclamation and Immigration Bureau; and a Young Men’s Department.

9. By the 1930s, the Greater New Orleans Hotel and Lodging Association was made up of directors of the La Salle Hotel, Hotel De Soto, Hotel New Orleans, Monteleone Hotel, Pontchartrain Hotel, St Charles Hotel, Roosevelt Hotel, and the Jung Hotel (Summary of Semi-Annual Accomplishments of the Convention and

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Visitors’ Bureau for the Period Jan. 1 – June 30, 1931, Vol. 37, p. 2 (MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

10. The development of the convention industry in the US received a major boost with the creation of the American Hotel and Lodging Association in 1910 and the International Association of Convention Bureaus (IACB) in 1914. The IACB held its first formal meeting in 1920 and adopted a code of ethics to promote professional practices three years later in 1923 (Ford and Peeper, 2007).

11. Annual Report of the Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, 6 November 1932, Vol. 39, p. 2 (MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

12. Annual Report of the Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, 6 November 1932, Vol. 39, p. 1 (MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

13. Annual Report of the Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, 25 November 1940, Vol. 55 (MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

14. Letter from Bethoe Gessner, Advertising Manager, Capitol Guide, to Mayor de Lesseps Morrison, 21 August 1946, box 3, folder 1 (MS 270. De Lesseps Morrison Collection, Tulane University).

15. Annual Report of the Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, 1 November 1945, Vol. 65 (MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

16. Annual Report of the Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, 1 November 1945, Vol. 65 (MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

17. The production of touristic images and discourses about New Orleans was bolstered through the creation of cooperative agreements with railroads, hotels, sightseeing tours, cab companies, and travel bureaus in preparing tourist guides and organizing tours. See What’s Being Done to Help the Growth of New Orleans: Civic, Industrial, Commercial as a Port. 1927 (A Report of the 1927 Activities of the Bureaus and Committees and of the New Orleans Association of Commerce), Vol. 29, pp. 57, 60 (MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

18. Minutes of the Meeting of the Publicity Committee, 5 February 1946, Vol. 67 (MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

19. Report for the Month of July, Convention and Tourist Bureau, 30 July 1921, Vol. 23 (MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

20. Report for June 1924 of the General Manager to the Board of Directors, New Orleans Association of Commerce, Vol. 26, p. 2 (MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

21. What’s Being Done to Help the Growth of New Orleans: Civic, Industrial, Commercial as a Port. 1927 (A Report of the 1927 Activities of the Bureaus and Committees and of the New Orleans Association of Commerce), Vol. 29, p. 6 (MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

22. Report of the Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, February 1932, Vol. 39, p. 2 (MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

23. August Report of the Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, 1 September 1933, Vol. 41, p. 1 (MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

24. Annual Report, Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, 24 November 1933, Vol. 41, p. 3 (MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

25. Annual Report, Publicity Department, for 1924. Submitted by Wilson S. Callender, Secretary, Publicity Department of the New Orleans Association of Commerce, Vol. 26 (MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

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26. ‘Revised List’ of stories from P.J. Rinderle, ed., Bureau of New Orleans News, 1938, Vol. 50 (MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

27. Letter from Bethoe Gessner, Advertising Manager, Capitol Guide, to Mayor de Lesseps Morrison, 21 August 1946; box 3, folder 1. Letter from De Lesseps Morrison, Mayor, to Mr Walter M. Holmes, Jr, Passenger Agent, Southern Pacific Line, 24 February 1947; box 3, folder 4. Letter from Rod Raimondy, Chairman, Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, to Mayor de Lesseps Morrison, 21 November 1946; box 8, folder 25 (MS 270: De Lesseps Morrison Collection. Special Collections, Howard Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA).

28. Full-page advertisement: ‘News from New Orleans’, proclaiming New Orleans the ‘International City’. Advertisement appears in New York Times (21 March 1948), New York Herald-Tribune (28 March 1948), Chicago Tribune (4 April 1948), Time Magazine (15 March 1948), and Newsweek (29 March 1948). Advertisement sponsored by the Greater New Orleans, inc. box 3, folder 5 (MS 270: De Lesseps Morrison Collection. Special Collections, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA).

29. Convention and Tourist Bureau, 15 October 1921, Vol. 23; What’s Being Done to Help the Growth of New Orleans: Civic, Industrial, Commercial as a Port. 1927 (A Report of the 1927 Activities of the Bureaus and Committees and of the New Orleans Association of Commerce), Vol. 29, p. 6; Annual Report of the Publicity Department, 30 November 1936, Vol. 47 (MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

30. Annual Report of the Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, 24 November 1933, Vol. 41, p. 4 (MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

31. Annual Report of the Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, 30 November 1937, Vol. 49; Annual Report of the Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, 20 November 1938, Vol. 51 (MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

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Kevin Fox Gotham is associate professor of sociology at Tulane University. His research focuses on the political economy of real estate, tourism, and urban redevelopment. He is the author of Authentic New Orleans: Race, Culture, and Tourism in the Big Easy (2007). Address: Department of Sociology, 220 Newcomb Hall, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA 70118–5698, USA. [email: [email protected]]

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