Dr. Andrew Wood Office: HGH 210; phone: (408) 924-5378 Email: wooda@email.sjsu.edu Web: http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/wooda

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In his chapter, "Early Motels" (pp. 129-173), Belasco notes that 1920s and 1930s cottage owners - generally rural farmers situated away from the city center - reflected the same democratic experience that inspired previous auto-gypsies. Anyone with some minor construction skills and a bit of road-aligned land could build some shacks and make some money. Eventually, many diversified - offering gas, sandwiches, and even some amusements for weary motorists. The growth of the roadside cottage industry emerged as many Americans became less enamored with the tenting-life. The search for soft primitivism emerges in writings of the day: "We like nature, but we must have our roads straight and smooth, and we want to view the scenery through the windows (usually closed)" (p. 131). Most importantly, the formerly heterogeneous nature of autocamps became reduced under the watchful eye of the proprietor who viewed social experimentation with suspicion. Once admitted, cottage residents could enjoy as much privacy as they wished, avoiding the "gauntlet" of the hotel lobby and the "open air" of the autocamp.

Even as cottage camps employed idiosyncratic names and architectural styles to define themselves, their standardization played into a larger theme in early twentieth-century America, the consumption community. Motorists grew to expect certain brands of bed, soap, and soft drink along the road. One might presume that the local democracy of the autocamp became replaced by the social norms of a larger imagined community, unified by the consumption of familiar goods and services. This process of standardization might have led to the growth of a more centralized motel industry in the 1930s, if not for the Depression. Americans continued to drive, many to vacation along the road, but the big money that would transform the industry would have to wait until better days. In the meantime, tourist camp boosters returned to the rhetoric of democracy and Edenic cohesion to be found at their sites, even though, "to be sure, as in the heyday of the free municipal camp, the 'all kinds' were predominantly middle class" (p. 145).

Predictably, many hotels, facing the Depression-era loss of revenue, attacked tourist cottages as an economic and social menace. Moreover, both hotels and tourist cottages (eventually eschewing the "camp" moniker in response to hotel-fed fears of supposedly dirty conditions at autocamps) feared the growth of tourist homes. While hotels enjoyed little flexibility in their response, associations of cottage camps and upscale tourist "courts" began to band together to fix prices, enforce standards and, ideally, develop national-level brand names. However, national-level cooperation could not be achieved during the Depression. Once economic hard times began to ease, however, both the motel and hotel industries flourished. Both performed a key role in the modernizing of America: "Hotels had introduced Americans to indoor plumbing, elevators, and single beds. In effect motels joined hotels as a promotional arm of the construction and home decorating industries" (p. 164). As tourist courts modernized, they added garages (usually interspersed with rooms) before streamlining into the L or U shape of the modern motel.

Initially, this combination - a few clean rooms, free parking, maybe a small cafe - appeared to be a wise move. However, a vacuum was created that would be filled by larger chains of motor-hotels offering many services, not just a few humble cottages. Not quite hotels, these postwar chains blurred the difference between the two types of businesses and spelled doom for the Mom and Pop motel. Despite a brief heyday in the 40s and 50s, single-owner motels headed for extinction, replaced by the Wal-Mart of the day, Holiday Inn. Where Americans had previously sought small comforts from unique individuals, they grew to trust nationally advertised chains that offered standardized services along the new interstate highways. The age of mobility was an age of increasing homogeneity where the best surprise became "no surprise."

Supplemental Website

To learn more about the evolution of motels, visit my Postcard History of Motels site at http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/wooda/card.html: " While families learned to breeze through these rest-stops that multiplied along the highways of postwar America, many of the owners settled in for a life's work. But, soon, those plans were demolished as limited access interstates began to snake across the nation in the fifties and sixties." Also, visit my page dedicated to Holiday Inn at http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/wooda/motelholidayinn.html: "Like Wal-Mart, the arrival of a bright shiny new Holiday Inn spelled doom for the older motels. Free ice, clean pools, kid-friendly pricing, and aggressive marketing proved an attractive lure for business and leisure travelers."

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