Into the Great Escapism: Vacationing Vagabonds Getting Nowhere Fast

As Roger Casey and John Urry have illustrated, nothing popularized automobility like the Ford brand, and Ford’s most effective marketing scheme capitalized on Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey’s popular Vagabond figure, a poetic gypsy escaping the degraded commercial world to find health and happiness in natural settings. Ignoring Hovey and Carman’s anti-industrial themes, Ford’s marketing represented Vagabonds as healthy citizens setting aside the mild entanglements of life to be rejuvenated in the serene countryside. Cagy legislators hedged the ways that they invoked leisure travel, which they relished, but not at the expense of more practical priorities. The naturalist John Burroughs similarly equivocated in favor of Ford’s vision with his depiction of the famous “Vagabonds” camping excursions of Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Harvey Firestone. High-society travel writers like Effie Price Gladding and Emily Post reconciled the discomforts of cross-country motor travel to their sense of cultured appreciation of the landscape while advocating for improved travel facilities. Yet by candidly sharing her own search for belonging, Zitkala-Ša called into question the entire Vagabond pretense while another Vagabond, Henry James, disgustedly exposed the vapid optimism and myopia developing into a nightmare of garish and degrading tourist rituals. For different reasons, Zitkala-Ša and James evince a deep cynicism regarding the nation, its roads, all its gadabout wanderers, and the ultimate corruption of the whole environment by the industrial economy of scale.