Hotels, and before them taverns and inns, have always been businesses that promoted the public good: housing and feeding strangers, offering locals opportunities for leisure and networking, hosting community events. Hotelkeepers have traditionally been community leaders, often politicians, and once a president of the United States. In the 1930s, a time of great skepticism about the profit motive, hotelkeepers again found ways to survive hard time and serve the public good. Sometimes they were forced to by their workers.
In this panel, Megan Elias discusses overbuilding in the 1920s and collapse in the 1930s, and how Conrad Hilton and other chain operators consolidated power after the hotel crash. The shift toward chains directly affected the public role of the hotel, from symbol of civic pride to local branch of global economic imperialism. Daniel Levinson Wilk compares the public-minded reputations of Henry Ford and hotelier E.M. Statler, and shows how the labor battles of the 1930s challenged both those reputations. Shaun Richman explains how the Hotel Trades Council won significant concessions from hotel owners in the 1930s that promoted the rights and interests of workers and customers over the profit motive of bosses. We will discuss what this history means for today, another period of hotel overbuilding and strike activism.