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chapter five ProDuCtion anD ConsumPtion in an ameriCan PalaCe, 1850–1875 “To Keep a Hotel” As hotels grew to such great size during the middle half of the nineteenth century, a system of hotel management evolved with the goal of efficiently serving the enormous numbers of both transient and permanent guests whose expectations for service had escalated with the size and extravagance of the buildings. This became known in both the United States and England as “the American System .”As historians of technology know well, these same words refer to the method of industrial manufacturing that emerged during the long nineteenth century that featured standardized, interchangeable parts and the organization of work into discrete segments. This manufacturing “American System” reached its ultimate configuration in Henry Ford’s moving assembly line in the 1920s.1 Contemporary observers deemed the hotel’s “American System” as no less transformative, complicated , and brilliant. In particular, British critics of their nation’s hotels championed the “American System,” regarding it as a cultural manifestation of American character, yet another example of Yankee manufacturing prowess and knowhow that had burst onto the world stage at London’s Great Exhibition of 1851. Despite this celebration of organization and production, social critics at home attacked these developments, focusing particularly on hotel extravagance and on the tendency of people—particularly bachelors and young married couples—to establish homes in hotels.Rather than“setting up housekeeping,”these young people did just the opposite, outsourcing, in effect, their domestic household management to professionals. They left the drudgery of housekeeping to the hotel staff, freeing themselves to partake in a life of purported debauchery. Such a life offered wives and mothers rewards not tied to any kind of work and directly challenged  Hotel Dreams ideas about domesticity that had developed in the first half of the century, ideas that reified the cult of womanhood and her place in the home as the guardian of virtuous American family life. The anonymity of fluid social relationships that characterized hotel life created similar problems for bachelors, who, with fewer social constraints, allegedly found themselves in predicaments that threatened their reputations and hopes for social advancement. Thus, ambivalence about the emerging consumer society and the artifice of fabricating social identities through the possession and display of material goods squared off against the celebration of industrial progress that the hotel represented. The luxury hotel served as a lightning rod for these debates that existed in the wider culture, because it housed—in aggrandized fashion—both production and consumption while at the same time forcing a confrontation between commercial culture and the domestic ideal. Critics recognized that these hotels represented big business.2 Not only was the hotel a regular industry, but it also functioned as an extension of the marketplace, so much so that one observer described the great hall of NewYork City’s Metropolitan as “a little Bourse,” referring to the Paris stock exchange.3 Hotel lobbies, bars, and billiard rooms served as gathering places for powerful men conducting both formal and informal business in the tradition of male sociability. Typical male activities such as drinking and conversation, particularly about women and business , were part of the worldly realm,replete with competition, bawdiness,and play. All of this stood in sharp opposition to the domestic realm of women that prized sincerity and levied on women the responsibility to seal their families off from the harsh realities of the world beyond the home.4 In horrifying contrast, money and appearance operated as the entrée to this world of consumption, where, for four to five dollars per day, those who wished could “sniff the upper air of the very latest civilization.”5 Women guests, while separated from actual business activity, flaunted their economic role in the luxury market by appearing conspicuously “en grande toilette .”6 More than anything else, the hotel’s brazen commercial nature and oversized luxurious décor placed it in the vanguard of the burgeoning middle- and upper-class consumer society and in direct opposition to traditional attitudes about domesticity and class hierarchy. Despite the private domestic nature of hotel services—incorporating sleeping accommodations, meals, bathing and toilet facilities —urban luxury hotels remained, as we have seen, commercial spaces. Within the richly decorated hotel parlors, men and women enjoyed a society divorced from the sober responsibilities associated with the domestic ideal and did so willfully , in the context of a market exchange. This hotel world differs greatly from the [18.117.196.217] Project MUSE...

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