Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Fall 2010
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly 30:4 (Fall 2010).
Abstract
"Tourists," said Doane Robinson, the father of Mount Rushmore, "soon get fed up on scenery." As car-based tourism exploded after World War I, South Dakotans believed the Black Hills needed not just pretty pines and streams, but a new layer of roadside attractions to bring in more tourists and keep them spending longer. This book is about the making of that tourist landscape-not so much the landscape itself, or the tourists looking at it, but the makers and movers behind the scenes who drove the transformation.
This is, in other words, a book about economic planning. It is a left-wing book in the sense that its heroes are Progressives holding office in the era from Theodore to Franklin Roosevelt, particularly South Dakota's own Peter Norbeck. The real push, Suzanne Barta Julin argues, came at the state level, not the local or federal, and it came from the government: "The success of tourism as a public enterprise allowed private tourism to flourish."
Comments
Copyright © 2010 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska.