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Article Excerpt
Today, one of the iconic images of vacation is a broad, sandy beach framed by palms and lapped by azure tropical waters. For many, including some historians of tourism, the attractiveness of hot-weather resorts confirms a natural human hedonism (1)--a belief constantly reinforced by resort and cruise advertisements. But places with warm climates did not attract many tourists before 1900, and not merely for lack of infrastructure and air conditioning. (2) Far from reflecting human nature, contemporary promotional materials for such resorts still bear the signs of the twentieth-century rearticulation of a venerable climatic determinism that linked warm climates to ill-health and backward, dark-skinned peoples. This rearticulation was instrumental in the emergence of places such as Florida, Southern California, Mexico, and the Caribbean as vacation destinations between 1880 and 1940. (3) Marketing "the tropics" as an elixir of horticultural fertility and the racial youthfulness attributed to the locals, travel businesses portrayed leisure as a natural resource instead of a social privilege. In doing so, they transformed climatic determinism from a pillar of white supremacy into a vehicle for reimagining the relationship between whites, the tropical environment, and nonwhite peoples in a positive light.
This transformation relied upon and contributed to a shift toward romanticism in the popular conceptualization of both race and nature. The romantic perspective--rooted in the eighteenth-century assertion of particularity, emotion, and nature against Enlightenment universalism, rationalism, and civilization-emphasized the spiritual importance of human interaction with untrammeled nature and celebrated nonwhites for their greater intimacy with the natural world--an intimacy rendered in garden-variety white supremacy as a primitive lack of mastery over both self and the environment. For early-twentieth-century bohemians and avant-garde artists, nonwhites exemplified humanity free of the psychic and social deformities imposed by civilization. Similarly, the tropics represented nature in its most fertile and giving aspect, places where people enjoyed perfect well-being without having to labor, as they had long ago in Eden. (4) Although by no means staffed by cultural radicals, the tourist industry used such romantic attitudes to sell tropical cruises, tours, and resorts. This reversal of the valence of climatic determinism resonated with the cultural claims of many antiracist and anticolonial movements at the time and helped to popularize cultural pluralism. (5) At the same time, it reinforced and elaborated on a centuries-old view of the American tropics as a cornucopia at the service of northerners, sustaining the region's history of environmental and economic spoliation.
As will already be obvious, I do not use the tropics in the scientific sense of "located between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn," or 23[degrees]26'22" north and south of the equator. Instead, I follow the usage of tourist entrepreneurs and tourists, who at times used the term to refer to any climate warmer than those of the northeastern and mid-western United States or northwestern Europe. Although writers also often distinguished between Mediterranean, semitropical or subtropical, and tropical zones, they attributed the same kinds of racial characteristics to people living in all three and advertised the pleasures of a visit to them with similar imagery--palm trees, endless sunshine, abundant flowers and fruit, and broad, sandy beaches. The very ubiquity of these attractions in places as different as Southern California and Jamaica signals the continuity and the transformation of ideas about climate, geography, and human nature that I analyze in this essay.
White Man's Grave (6)
In a fable set in the 1850s and published in the U.S. magazine Overland Monthly in 1870, two young white American men sail from New York for the California goldfields. As they wait for canoes to take them across the Isthmus of Panama, one falls ill with "Isthmus fever," and a young mixed-race woman lovingly tends to him. Although her care preserves the man's life, it leads to a fate worse than death: he decides to stay in Panama with her. "It was a regular Arcadia that he had contrived in his imagination," sighs the narrator:
While we other poor devils were to go up to the mines, and there delve and wear out our strength, and become toil-bent and haggard in our profitless pursuit of the glittering metal, or ... find all our labor lead to no pleasant result, since our very riches would involve us in the entanglements of a vicious and artificial civilization.... He would marry his native flame.... The fruits of the ground would be their food, and the birds should sing around them.... In such an oasis of pleasant days their lives would gently glide along. (7)
Here are all the dangers of the tropics in a single passage. First is the physical, the fever evoking the deadly yellow fever and malaria that European expansion and slave trading spread to all of the world's warm places. Then, with death postponed, the moral danger, in which the appeal of a life of leisure and self-indulgence undermines ambition and racial difference, culminates in the wholesale rejection of civilization.
Behind the fear lay two discourses on the tropics. The first was a venerable fantasy of a return to Eden, that place before original sin condemned humans to labor for their sustenance, free of both the economic hardships and the political corruption typical of Europe. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this vision of the tropics was gradually marginalized by the second, a pessimistic version of climatic determinism that gained currency as genocide, plantation agriculture, and slavery degraded the physical environment and its utopian social prospects. Reinvigorated by the U.S. and European imperial scrambles and the expansion of white settlement in Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this discourse posited that people's character and well-being depended on daily temperatures and seasonal changes, wind, humidity, and the quality of the soil, among other factors. On a collective level, warm climates produced dark-skinned people who were hot-blooded, emotional, and indolent, whereas temperate climates generated light-skinned people who were cool, rational, and hardworking. Scholars argued about whether racial differences derived from climatic differences and, therefore, might change with migration or whether God had created each race to occupy its own climatic zone, in which case races were immutable. The fear that whites might become dark-skinned--might "degenerate," in the racial language of the day--limited North Americans' and Europeans' capacity to exploit tropical riches that imperialists were loath to accept. (8)
The linkages among race, health, and climate remained strong well into the twentieth century, and American geographers were among their most fervent advocates. Ellen Churchill Semple asserted that "[t]he intense heat and humidity of most tropical lands prevent any permanent occupation by a native-born population of pure whites." (9) Where whites did not thrive, such scholars concluded, civilization would not arise. Ellsworth Huntington, another American geographer, made this argument most exhaustively in Civilization and Climate (1915). Beginning with this principle--"it is generally agreed that the native races within the tropics are dull in thought and slow in action"--he undertook painstaking experimental and statistical research to conclude that his unexceptional hypothesis was correct: "The civilization of the world varies almost precisely as we should expect if human energy were one of the essential conditions, and if energy were in large part dependent upon climate." (10)
Yet U.S. and European colonization of "tropical" areas continued, and colonial officials had to find solutions to a problem many geographers regarded as insoluble. Like others of his ilk, U.S. Army doctor Charles Woodruff argued that whites could survive in the U.S.-occupied Philippines and other hot places only with the proper prophylaxis: "Day clothing should be opaque.... The hat must be of wide brim and thick enough to exclude all the rays [of the sun]," and houses, schools, and hospitals must be kept dark. He also recommended avoiding strenuous physical and mental activity. (11) Other physicians called for special layers of clothing to protect the kidneys and advised whites...
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