Paper in response to Rothman

Rothman focuses on locals and how the coming of a tourist-based economy looked to them. "A view of tourism from the perspective of the visited," Rothman suggests, "highlights a different set of relationships" (p. 21).  Devil's Bargain's is about the economic, social, and political consequences that flow from choosing tourism as an economic base. As the title indicates, Rothman argues that choosing tourism has usually been a "devil's bargain," a process whereby locals sold their souls (or, increasingly, lost them is hostile corporate takeovers) for economic rewards that turned out to be mixed at best.

Three phases of development, Rothman argues, have defined tourism in the twentieth-century West:

• First, there was what Rothman refers to as the "tourism of hegemony," an upper class variant, coming out of the nineteenth century, that defined the tourist experience in terms of cultural uplift. By the end of World War One, the centrality of this cultural or heritage tourism, which was reliant upon rail travel and grand destination hotels, was challenged by a recreational brand of tourism made possible by the automobile and improved roads.
• In this second phase, middle class Americans stormed the custodial barricades of the tourism of hegemony and embraced instead an individualistic model of Western tourist travel. The coherent iconography of a scenic and mythic West splintered, Rothman argues, as Americans gained the ability to define tourism on their own terms.
• Finally, after World War Two, entrepreneurs developed a model of entertainment tourism that engulfed the first two phases, producing a malleable variant of tourism based more in ever-changing unreality than in the authentic West that had defined cultural and, to a lesser extent, recreational tourism.

 "The West is the location of the American creation myth. When Americans paid homage to their national and nationalistic roots, they did not look to Indepen­dence Hall; they went west as they believed their forefathers did, to find self and create society, to build anew from the detritus of the old.... This need for redefinition explains the historic and modern fixation with the West in the United States and even in Europe.... This is the core of the complicated 'devil's bargain' that is twentieth-century tourism in the American West. Success creates the seeds of its own destruction as more and more people seek the experience of an "authentic" place transformed to seem more 'authentic.' In search of 'lifestyle' instead of life, these seekers of identity and amenity transform what they touch beyond recognition."

Write a 4-6 page paper in which you explain your understanding of Rothman's argument that to understand the West -- its significance and its future -- we must study the development of tourism and its consequences for local control of place.

Cite pages in Rothman within ( ). If you use other sources -- cite using Turabian style.