"Bed, Bath, Boom and Bust: American Hotels and the Great Depression"

When the US economy retreated into depression in 1929, the hotel industry had been going through a decade of overbuilding. Civic growth and enthusiasm coupled with easy lending policies had produced more rooms than could be sold even in a thriving economy. The collapse confirmed what industry insiders had warned about—people were building hotels for which there was no market. What happened to hotels during and after the crisis fundamentally changed the industry, shifting money from local projects to national chains. Hotels had been a source of civic pride before the crash. After the recovery, they became corporate properties, contributing to a company’s portfolio. In this paper I explore the experience of one hotelier, Conrad Hilton, in navigating the boom of the 1920s, the bust of the 1930s, and the new landscape of the post war period, when he established the world’s first global hotel chain. For Hilton, his own near brush with total failure in 1933 served as a watershed moment. He invested his regular retellings of the experience with religious meaning. Setting Hilton’s many versions of the story in conversation with each other and with industry journalism from the era, we can see how repositioning hotels from regional to national institutions shaped the industry for the future.