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In September 1931, the American Automobile Association (AAA) announced a substantial boom in travel to the Western United States, with some of their travel bureaus reporting a fifty percent increase in the number of inquiries received over the previous year ("Organized Motordom" IO).1 The notice, which was printed in the organization's monthly magazine, credited the federal government with stimulating much of this tourism. It explained that federally subsidized highway and road construction, combined with "improved motoring services" and the low cost of vacationing in the national parks, encouraged motor travel.2 This tide of tourism, as the notice described it, continued under the Roosevelt administration, which sponsored a variety of roadbuilding programs and highway improvements in an attempt to spark the depression era economy. In addition to funding emergency road repairs, the administration subsidized the construction of new bridges and roads, as well as highways like Skyline Drive, the Blue Ridge Parkway, and the Key West Overseas Highway.
In addition to these projects, the government launched a series of promotions to encourage travel within the United States, including a "see America" campaign. As a part of this initiative, the United States Travel Bureau commissioned the Federal Art Project (FAP) to create a number of posters promoting domestic travel. The series, which includes a large pictorial map of the United States and several smaller posters of specific tourist sites, equated tourism with a knowledge of the nation that extends beyond the topography of the land. Illustrating historical sites, popular cultural attractions, and natural landmarks, the series links national identity with a shared history as well as geography. In promoting destinations that represented the nation's past and present, the collection exemplifies the depression era search for a usable past that could ameliorate social tensions and unite Americans by recovering and affirming national values. Moreover, it equated the Native and African American to this seemingly authentic past while downplaying their respective roles in the modern nation-state and promoting a vision of America predicated on whiteness.
While scholars have written extensively on other FAP projects, including prints produced by the FAP's graphic arts division, few have focused on the project's posters. Furthermore, what has been published offers little contextualization for the works beyond the circumstances surrounding their production.3 The FAP's...