In this blog post Catherine Cocks, author of Tropical Whites: The Rise of the Tourist South in the Americas, considers the history of a popular vacation souvenir, the sun tan.
The Truth about Tanning
Catherine Cocks
Every time I told someone I was researching the history of sun tanning for my forthcoming book, that person promptly told me the history of tanning, or at least a popular version of that history. I’m sure it just popped into your mind, too: Back when nearly everyone worked on a farm, being pale was a sign that you were rich and got to stay inside. Once nearly everyone worked in a factory, being tanned was a sign that you were rich and got to play outside. Slate’s Explainer offered a version of this story in October 2012 and tacked onto it the much-repeated myth that tanning was a fad invented by Coco Chanel after the First World War (it appears in her Wikipedia entry, too).
The trouble is that’s not how it happened. At its origins, the history of tanning isn’t about class. It’s about race. What else could changing your skin color be about? Skin color has been a major pretext for inequality for hundreds of years. And the early twentieth century, the era in which U.S. whites began to tan, was the time of Jim Crow’s triumph, explicitly racist immigration restrictions, and a global white supremacist movement. When people talked about tanning back then, they talked about race.
In an August 1907 protest against the practice, the Chicago Daily Tribune wrote: “Take the seacoast or summer resort trains which are met by bands of savages, their faces tanned to a deep mahogany, their collars turned in, and their sleeves rolled up; they are not unlike the natives of some tropical island. There is a deal of whooping when the astonished pale face descends from the train and is carried away by the indecorous South Sea Islanders.” Yes, this is meant to be funny, but it appeared at a time when fears of “racial degeneration”—whites turning into nonwhites—were common, notably among the government officials enforcing U.S. control over tropical islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean.
Why on earth would white people deliberately darken their skins, given such ideas? In Tropical Whites, I argue that pale-skinned people’s tanning constituted a kind of “brownface,” a playful experiment in becoming nonwhite that embodied a renovated relationship between civilization and nature. If whites emulated nonwhites by cultivating a close bond with nature, tanning advocates promised, they would become more youthful and sexy—that is, more like nonwhites, who had long been accused of being childlike and promiscuous.
Fashion tips aimed at white women makes this racial subtext clear. In the early 1920s, the women’s magazine The Delineator exulted that “the sun and the wind are our friends again, as they were when the world was young.” And this friendship produced in a white woman “something a little rakish and yet very sweet, like a girl from a South Sea isle who knows the wind and the sun and the sea and what life is for, and nothing about the ugliness of sin and bored living: enchanting and free.”
Advice aimed at men promised that getting a tan would endow the white male sunbather with the youthful potency associated with nonwhite men. A 1926 Los Angeles Times article stated that although “nobody sympathizes with a sunburned elderly bachelor,” everyone would admire the new man who emerged from the peeling skin: “What a husky dog he is, and quite young-looking! Brown as an Indian.” Such tanned whites retained the power of whiteness, as a Jack London’s A Son of the Sun protagonist demonstrated: “Ardent suns had likewise tanned his face till it was swarthy as a Spaniard’s. . . . It was difficult to realize that the skin of this man had once been fair” but his blue eyes and blond hair asserted that crucial fact. As a result of his ability to be both brown and white, he was the commercial master of the South Pacific: “As the golden tint burned into his face it poured molten out of the ends of his fingers.”
So sun tanning in its beginnings was about race more than class. Of course, there is much more to be said about tanning, some of which I say in Tropical Whites and some of which can be found in works by James Walvin, Simon Carter, Marguerite Shaffer, Sarah Schrank, and Daniel Freund, among others. But much remains to be written.
Catherine Cocks is an acquiring editor at the University of Iowa Press and author of Doing the Town: The Rise of Urban Tourism in the United States, 1850-1915.
