Essay: THE FOREIGNER DISCOVERS AMERICAN (AND VICE VERSA)

JAPANESE girls at Natural Bridge, Germans at the pool sides of a hundred Holiday Inns, an Italian family at Radio City Music Hall, British motorists at Old Faithful—these are the newest innocents abroad. Since 1961, when Congress, hoping to reduce the balance-of-payments drain, set up the U.S. Travel Service as the nation's first official tourist bureau, the number of foreign visitors to America has more than doubled. This year 1,200,000 of them (excluding border crossers from Canada and Mexico) are busily proving for themselves the truth of Lord Bryce's 19th century axiom: "America excites an admiration which must be felt upon...

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