Review
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Title: Manifest Destinations: Cities and Tourists in the Nineteenth-Century American West
Author: J. Philip Gruen
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Genre: U.S. history
Year Published: 2014
Number of Pages: 254
Binding: Hardback
ISBN13: 978-0806144887
Price: $29.95
Reviewed by Greg Seppi for the Association for Mormon Letters
J. Philip Gruen comes to the history of the western U.S. via his time as a tour guide in Chicago, which he details in the introduction to this new book from the University of Oklahoma Press. Gruen is the Interim Director and an Associate Professor in the School of Design and Construction at Washington State University, Pullman. Following his brief career as a tour guide, he acquired an MA in the History of Architecture and Art from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Architecture from UC-Berkeley.
The focus of this text is on the dynamic interplay between environments, urban norms, “Manifest Destiny” and architecture. Gruen comes at the history of the western U.S. from the perspective of late 19th century tourists, who were often confused by the discrepancy between the descriptions of cities such as Chicago, Salt Lake City, San Francisco and Denver in guidebooks and the busy, ugly reality of life in the city. Ultimately this is a very simple book; Gruen demonstrates the incongruities resulting from the failure of western cities to live up to the shining examples of urban progress and white conquest that 19th century guidebooks and boosters portrayed them as. “[T]ourists proved that western cities could not be so easily delineated,” writes Gruen. “[T]ourist encounters often uncovered a less efficient, less refined, and less progressive urban cultural landscape than the cities’ promoters might have preferred. Cosmopolitanism—as with much else in the late nineteenth-century urban American West—remained a complicated, complex, and contested terrain” (p. 200).
This book will greatly interest specialists in the history of the 19th century American West, and it was one of the books I was most looking forward to at the beginning of 2014. It will be of greater interest, however, to those interested in historical architecture and so-called “low” American literature. It will certainly also intrigue those who are interested in the interplay between American identity and Mormonism. Brigham Young and other LDS leaders purposefully promoted Salt Lake City as a tourist destination, likely hoping to soften media depictions of the Saints, which generally showed them to be conniving, murderous, slavish and objects of derision (p. 173). Gruen notes that in order “[t]o divert tourist attention away from whatever preconceived negative impressions they may have held about the Mormons, guidebooks focused on the settlers’ ability to make an otherwise remote and desolate wilderness blossom like the proverbial rose” (p. 57).
Gruen suggests that there was an inherent conflict between the west as depicted in guidebooks and as it was experienced by tourists. Yet as he himself discovered on a self-guided tour that he describes in the epilogue to the text, what made his trip enjoyable, even memorable, was the minor incongruities between his expectations and his experiences:
“In Chicago, an otherwise leisurely morning coffee repeatedly interrupted…. In Denver, the refreshing taste of a strawberry milkshake… in Salt Lake City, the comfortable feel of the handlebar grips as I biked next to the railroad tracks along South Sixth West; and in San Francisco, the pungent smell of marijuana and urine in several nooks crannies, semi-public spaces, and public parks (p. 212-213).”
I might suggest that the most successful guidebook may be that which fails to capture the full color of an experience; after all, why visit a place when one can simply read about it?
Gruen seems to suggest that disappointment and confusion were the most common reactions to the bustle and haste of activity in western cities; yet the accounts he draws on are almost universally published accounts that would have been widely available to every segment of the population, not least the leisure class which could actually afford to travel. What he does not explain is why the West became a tourist destination to begin with, or what the actual expectations of tourists before they arrived were. While this book strives to capture the tourist experience as found in non-mainstream published accounts, it would have been greatly improved by a reliance instead on archival sources.
By setting up positive accounts of western cities as examples of boosterism (in other words, essentially unreliable), I wonder if Gruen errs too much on the side of accepting negative accounts of tourist experiences? As Gruen himself notes, each traveler arrived with his or her social, cultural, religious and political biases. The role those biases played in the creation of tourist narratives is rarely discussed in any specific way, though it is occasionally mentioned. The portions of the book which discuss the architecture and construction projects that characterized major western cities are quite strong and interesting, but I felt that Gruen needed to interrogate the guidebooks and tourist narratives he cited more critically.
Genre is a significant problem of any type of literature—that is, understanding the specific role that a text played in its cultural context—but I felt that the book failed to fully explore the range, meanings and motives behind the creation and publication of books on the west. Certainly they played a role in depicting the West as “settled,” in incorporating the western experience into the history of the U.S., but the guidebook and the tourist account have deep roots in world history, and the book is lacking a strong section on the idiosyncrasies of late 19th century guidebooks and tourist accounts of the American West.
That being said, this book provides an excellent introduction to questions of space in the west. As an architectural historian, Gruen is very aware of trends in architectural history in the 20th and 21st century, and indeed places his history in opposition to a purely aesthetic history of architecture (see, for example, his discussion of the absence of nonvisual sensory experience from traditional histories, p. xx).
While Gruen occasionally seems more interested in the urban experience in Chicago and San Francisco, Salt Lake City also receives a good deal of coverage, including a lengthy section on its prominent buildings. Gruen dedicates eight pages in this relatively short text to discussing tourist accounts of visiting the Tabernacle and Temple Square, and his account of the ZCMI building was likewise interesting. He suggests that:
“Many [19th century] tourists seemed incapable of, or unwilling to, separate the physical environment from their preconceived, steadfast notions of Mormons and Mormonism and looked to confirm their negative preconceptions at nearly every turn… (p. 136).”
One visitor, for example, wrote of “Salt Lake City’s ‘sombre-looking’ adobe houses of ‘unattractive stupidity’ when he visited in the early 1870s. ‘Unattractive’ could be interpreted as reasonable aesthetic criticism. But stupid?” [emphasis in the original] (p. 143).
In a later chapter on the cosmopolitanism of western cities, Gruen notes that western tourists visited Salt Lake City in great numbers –“150,000-200,000 per year by 1900”—in order “to experience what they perceived as a deviant population on native soil… This alone set them apart from most tourists, and as historian Patricia Limerick has argued, cast them as exotic and ‘other’ in the popular imagination” (p. 172). This analysis is followed by a lengthy discussion of the experiences of tourists among Salt Lake City’s Mormon residents and the socioeconomic perceptions of them which they recorded, often related to the visitor’s perceptions of Mormonism in general. However, many visitors were disappointed to find the Mormons no different from any other group of people—in fact, Gruen notes, “the on-the-ground tourist experiences suggest a late nineteenth-century Salt Lake City population far more akin to that of other western cities than tourists either expected or desired” (p. 182).
I can easily recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of architecture in western American cities. While the book is hardly the final word on the 19th century urban experience, it is a useful contribution to our understanding of contested identities in the west. The Mormons in Salt Lake City play a prominent role in the text, and LDS readers will likely find the accounts of visitors to be interesting. Gruen synthesizes numerous accounts about the Mormons and their buildings in a way that enhances our understanding of the experience of visitors to Salt Lake City in the years following the Civil War. This book absolutely deserves a place on the bookshelf of those who are interested in outsider perspectives on late 19th-century Utah, though I hesitate to recommend it to readers who are bored by academic writing styles—this is a thoroughly academic book. It would be perfect for a college course on architecture or the urban experience in the West. That being said, Gruen’s reliance on published accounts over archival sources is a serious weakness of the text. I’m a bit surprised that he wasn’t able to find letter collections or journals that detail tourists’ trips through the cities in the text, and hopefully future scholarship, whether from Gruen or someone else, will correct this problem.