The United States turns 250 this summer, and the momentum has, to put it politely, gotten away from us. There are now two competing federal commissions—one bipartisan and created by Congress, the other a White House task force that sells million dollar donor packages with private photos attached. PragerU has produced AI-generated videos of the founding fathers. Unfortunately, the US Mint coins struck commemorating abolition, suffrage, and the civil rights movement. A high school athletic competition is planned called the Patriot Games, which is the actual name, not a parody. Some of them would be funny if they weren’t so expensive.
What survives, oddly enough, is the architecture of where key moments in the country’s history took place. Not marble rotundas or battlefield obelisks – both built to be remembered, but hotels instead. Places where the founders waited on stagecoaches, where suffragists delivered whiskey to wavering legislators, where presidents drafted speeches in their shirtsleeves at 2 a.m. because the air conditioning was off.
Hospitality is not an environment that historians often take seriously, which is precisely why so much of the country’s current business has taken place in lobbies, bar rooms and corner suites. Abraham Lincoln finalized his first inauguration in salon no. 6. John Maynard Keynes argued for exchange rate parity in a New Hampshire dining room. Harry Burn ran across Capitol Hill to a hotel switchboard to tell his mother that the 19th Amendment had passed.
12 hotels follow. Each is still in operation and has documentary evidence of the scene attached. Claims mythologized – Willard invented “lobbying,” Faulkner writes The Sound and the Fury over a Sazerac in Monteleone—are left on the curb. (Though on second glance, the tendency toward exaggeration seems to be an American trait.) What remains is the verifiable kind of story, which is exactly the kind worth reserving a room for.
