Hotels

Hotels were among the earliest facilities that bound the United States together. They were both creatures and creators of communities, as well as symptoms of the frenetic quest for community. Even in the first part of the nineteenth century, Americans were already forming the habit of gathering from all corners of the nation for both public and private, business and pleasure purposes. Conventions were the new occasions, and hotels were distinctively American facilities making conventions possible. The first national convention of a major party to choose a candidate for President(that of the National Republican Party, which met on December 12, 1831, and nominated Henry Clay for President) was held in Baltimore, at a hotel that was then reputed to be the best in the country. The presence in Baltimore of Barnum's City Hotel, a six-story building with two hundred apartments, helps explain why many other early national political conventions were held there.

In the longer run, too, American hotels made other national conventions not only possible but also pleasant and convivial. The growing custom of regularly assembling from afar the representatives of all kinds of groups—not only for political conventions, but also for commercial, professional, learned, and a vocational ones—in turn supported the multiplying hotels. By the mid twentieth century, conventions accounted for over a third of the yearly room occupancy of all hotels in the nation; about eighteen thousand different conventions were held annually with a total attendance of about ten million people.

The nineteenth century American hotel keepers, who were no longer the genial, deferential "hosts" of the eighteenth century European inn, became leading citizens. Holding a large stake in the community, they exercised power to make it prosper. As owners or managers of the local "palace of the public", they were makers and shapers of a principal community attraction. The travelers from abroad were mildly shocked by this high social position.