In changing the ways in which North Americans understood travel and commodities together, the North American postcard craze (1890-1910) generated cultural activity and anxiety in equal measure. Using specific examples of postcards from transnational attractions (Worlds' Fairs in Chicago 1893 and St. Louis 1904) and from "exotic" resorts (Banff circa 1900), I mean to argue that by soliciting, through a representation of place, tourists and immigrants to come to North America, postcards effectively jeopardized the boundaries, conceptual as well as material, of those cultures they helped to energize and transform.
Beginning with the U.S. federal deregulation of postal cards in the last years of the century, and intensifying with the Chicago World's Fair, the postcard craze, already thriving in Europe, took North American markets by storm--reconfiguring the terms of visual alongside informational production and consumption, encouraging patterns of travel alongside ones of collection, and significantly jeopardizing the hegemony of prevailing orders of taste. Not surprisingly, then, postcards were roundly condemned by agents of elite culture anxious about the erosion of highbrow authority as exemplified by arts of literate epistolary representation. Thus by 1906 in the American Magazine postcards were branded a "malady" and "formidable epidemic" brought to North America "in the baggage of tourists and immigrants." The language of epidemiology here indicates those ways in which postcards underscore not just the instability but the infectiousness of the instability linking presence to absence, foreign to familiar, embodiment to disembodiment, original to copy. Metaphors of disease gloss well-worn Progressive-era fears of cultural mongrelization; the new commodities of industrial mass culture--ceaselessly reproducible and reproducing--threaten constantly to infect the body politic, the body of capital, they simultaneously vivify. And the blaming of tourists and immigrants locates the real threat to the health of the corporate body not just in foreign agents but more pointedly in the patterns of movement and travel such agents characteristically practice. Here anxiety takes shape in response to the ambiguously desirable bodies (tourists, immigrants) and commodities (postcards) that, by the first years of the new century, together helped to delineate emergent pop culture (in industrial hubs like Chicago and St. Louis as in "otherworldly" retreats like Banff). The hurried and fleeting displacement of bodies and landscapes that postcards achieve through their cryptic transmission of affect and itinerary underwrites, as ironically as consequentially, the inescapable cultural placement of the tourist and immigrants who will not stop coming.
Thus understood, the North American postcard craze affords a means of imagining the links that, at the turn of the century, connected traveling practice to consumer education and transnational anxiety to itinerant desire. By tracing these links, we may begin to understand more fully the intensity of which the politics of mobility ("travel") animate those of belonging ("home").
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