Hotel America: cultural significance and historical context

Transformations in Lewis Lapham's Hotel America

Lapham, Lewis. Hotel America. New York: Verso Press, 1996.

At the beginning of his text, Hotel America, commentator and essayist Lewis Lapham speculates that the nationally articulated transformational challenge or project of American democracy to change the class hierarchy of Europe many have ended. "Although I know that Jefferson once said that it is never permissible 'to despair of the commonwealth,' I think it is possible that the American experiment with democracy may have run its course ... I keep running across people who speak fondly about what they imagine to be the comforts of autocracy, who long for the assurances of the proverbial man on the white horse likely to do something hard and puritanical about the moral relativism that has made a mess of the cities, the schools and primetime television." (10) In other words, in Lapham's eyes, America has experienced a transformation in its imputation of responsibility from grass roots to government. Americans, contrary to the spirit of much of their previous ideological history, now believe that change must come from above, not from the populace.

When Lapham wrote the essays complied in Hotel America during the Regan and Bush administrations, "between 1978 and 1987 American families belonging to the poorest 20% of the population became 8% poorer; during the same period of time American families within the richest 20% of the population became 13% richer. The disparity between rich and poor was most glaringly apparent at the extreme points of measurement." (47) America's economic makeup and balance had changed, but few articulated their despair at this shift in consciousness, because the media and the populace had grown so complacent. "Of all the federal money distributed as transfer payments to individual Americans during the decade of the 1980s only a relatively small percentage found its way into the hands of the poor. The bulk of the donative sustained the pretensions of the mostly affluent and well to do. Without the help of the government, the self-reliant American middle class was as helpless as a child without its nurse," particularly, the author prophetically writes, in regards to favorable tax legislation for the wealthier middle class, and favorable social security and bankruptcy legislation for the lower middle classes. (73)

Why was this the case? The author suggests that despite the anti-government rhetoric of these conservative Republicans who demonized the innovations of social programs and personal activism the 1960s and early 1970s, there was a loss of political empowerment as the most powerful Americans became increasingly self-satisfied with their lots in life and positions, while poorer Americans became disenfranchised and depressed with their apparent disappearance from the American agenda of change and reform. "Somewhere toward the middle of the decade of the 1980s, for the first time in the nation's history, the income that the American people earned from capital (that is, from rents, dividends and interest) equaled the sum earned as wages." (47) But "the company of the blessed" did not represent an impressive percentage of the population "probably no more than 5% but when counted as an absolute number (ten or twelve million timid and self-interested individuals) they comprise a formidable political faction." (47)

Thus, what Lapham calls the "cosseting" of the Republican businessman yielded a deficit in full American democratic participation in the set agenda, media concerns, and feeling of empowerment in the nation. As the individual became less economically, politically, and rhetorically powerful he or she looked to government for solutions, solutions the business-focused government of the Republicans of the 20th century were unwilling to provide. (53)

This transformation of the America of Jack Kennedy that strove to change the world, into Reagan's media-created cartoon of a 'morning in America' for all in the post-Vietnam era also spilled over into an increasingly self-centered foreign policy agenda. Lapham writes that "while the US. cannot become the world's 'policeman,' by assuming responsibility for righting every wrong, we will retain the pre-eminent responsibility for addressing selectively those wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies or friends, or which could seriously unsettle international relations." (80) This sense of American pre-eminence may have shifted with the more pervasive threat of terrorism, the rise of the European Union, and the fall of communism in the 21st century, but the need for a challenging ideology of idealism, rather than self-serving isolationism or imperialism remains well taken even today. Lapham even warns of "threats to U.S. citizens from terrorism or regional or local conflict," in regions we only imperfectly understand, given the relative youth of the American nation in relation to other nations of the world community. (80)