The Hotel: An American History (review)

Hotels have provided the backdrop for a wide range of important events in American history, including the “Sack of Lawrence” during the sectional crisis and the infamous “smoke-filled room” that propelled Warren G. Harding to the White House in 1920. But historians have seldom treated these institutions as more than passive, inert settings. In an engaging, lavishly illustrated book, Sandoval-Strausz focuses on the hotel itself, exploring its development as a distinctive social setting and architectural form during the long nineteenth century. Although the volume devotes considerable attention to the great luxury hotels of the era, the narrative also discusses resorts, residential hotels, and flophouses.

Sandoval-Strausz argues that the development of these specialized buildings reflected the rise of “capitalism” and “modernity” in the United States. American hotels became distinct from public inns during the 1790s and proliferated with the growth of long-distance commerce and the increasing mobility of the American population. As market relations extended to all corners of the nation, merchants and other travelers needed reliable, safe accommodations in both major urban centers and far-flung settings. Hotels developed and expanded to fill this need.

But Sandoval-Strausz also asserts that hotels accelerated economic growth during the nineteenth century. They institutionalized and commercialized “hospitality,” creating specialized forms of space, rules of social comportment, and workforces that enabled strangers to interact, conduct business, and even engage in illicit activities, especially adultery. “In a travel-dependent economy,” Sandoval-Strausz explains, “hotels played the same role in facilitating human mobility that banks played with respect to capital and warehouses, lumberyards, and stockyards did with respect to commodities” (237). Moreover, the “common law of innkeepers” helped to maintain predictable, familiar standards for lodging and public accommodation. Other scholars, most notably Janowitz, described similar social mechanisms, in which customs and institutions—such as voluntary associations, political parties, chainstores, and letters for transfer for church membership—integrated outsiders into both local and national networks.¹ Sandoval-Strausz, however, links this sociological process of establishing “voluntary communities” or “communities of limited liability” to a specific physical setting.

The book’s broad conceptual framework and overarching argument account for both the strengths and the relative weaknesses of the analysis. Sandoval-Strausz skillfully connects the history of the hotel to macrocosmic changes in nineteenth-century American society, especially the rise of cities and the expansion of capitalism. To support his argument, he draws from an impressive range of sources, including legal and business records, architectural plans, newspapers, diaries, and novels. Yet, his analysis, which is supposed to cover the entire nation from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, sometimes relies on evidence that consists of single quotations from travel accounts. Likewise, his argument occasionally attenuates and reifies dynamic processes, obscuring temporal and regional differences and compressing fluid class and gender ideologies into fixed categories—such as his discussion of the “particular concerns and anxieties of the nineteenth-century middle class” (271). But even if the book is more suggestive than definitive at times, Sandoval-Strausz provides an unusually thoughtful and provocative perspective on an important American institution.