A History of the American People

revolutions of 1848-9, which caused scores of thousands to flee. Never before or since was
immigration so high per capita of the American population. The California gold rush sent it up to
a record 427,833 in 1854, then the late-fifties panic sent it down with a crash to 153,640 in 1860.
By that date there were 4 million foreign-born settlers in the United States, out of a total
population of 27 million. They came from all over Europe, but mostly from Britain, Ireland, and
Germany, the Irish staying east of the Alleghenies, the Germans pushing on into the Midwest to
farm.
America was also admired for many other things in addition to high wage-rates and cheap
land. First was the American Cottage,' a hit in Europe about 1800. Then cameAmerican
Gardens.' From about 1815 what struck Europeans most was the size and luxury of American
hotels. It is not so surprising that American hotels should have been big and comfortable: entire
families lived in hotels for years, and in Washington DC it was rare for congressmen, senators,
and Cabinet members to acquire their own houses before 1850. The first luxury hotel was
Barnham's City Hotel in the boom-town of Baltimore, built 1825-6, which had no fewer than 20 0
bedrooms, twice as big as the largest in Europe. The Astor House in New York, built by J. J.
Astor from 1832, had 309 bedrooms, plus-amazingly-no fewer than seventeen bathrooms. The
Continental in Philadelphia (1858), which housed 800-900 people in suites, doubles, and singles,
struck a new high in size and luxury (Europe's largest was then the Queen's, Cheltenham, the Grandest Hotel in Europe,' with 1uo rooms). American hotels were often distinguished and aggrandized by a central lobby, under a rotunda (the hotel atrium of the 1980s and 1990s is a rediscovery of this feature). The first such was the Exchange Coffee House Hotel in Boston, 1806-9, and the St Louis, in New Orleans, built in 1839, was a replica of this on a larger scale. The Palace Hotel in San Francisco, 1874-6, with its 850 bedrooms and 437 bathrooms, was so big that carriages could actually drive into the center, the coming-and-going forming an amusement for the other guests. It is significant that the influence of monumental American hotels gave rise to the first recorded complaint of Yankee cultural colonization, which came (needless to say) from a Frenchman; in 1870 Edmond de Goncourt lamented that Paris hotels were being 'Americanized.' The newutopian' factories of New England were also much admired. The English novelist
Anthony Trollope called Lowell the realisation of a commercial Utopia.' Harriet Martineau, the English economist, writing of Waltham, enthused:There is no need to enlarge on the pleasure of
an acquaintance with the operative classes of the United States."' In fact there was a strong
authoritarian atmosphere in some of these model' factories, an adumbration of Henry Ford's system 1910-30. At Lowell in 1846, it was reported that operatives worked thirteen hours a day, from dawn till dusk in winter (but this is from a hostile account). Long hours were certainly common. In Rhode Island entire families, including small children, contracted to work for employers. What all observers recorded was the absence of begging. As one of them put it in 1839:During two years spent in traveling through every part of the Union, I have only once
been asked for alms.' To Europeans, that seemed incredible, the real proof of a benevolent
prosperity.
Americans were already associated with `modernity,' with new ways of doing things. This
applied particularly to social welfare and public works. The first big international success was
Auburn Prison, New York State, in 1820. This pinched an idea from the big Paris bazaars and
applied it to a penitentiary-top-lit galleries with massed stories of cells ranged on either side.
Then in 1825, John Haviland joined this idea to Jeremy Bentham's panopticon prison idea of
1791, with a ground-plan formed by the spokes of a wheel and a central observation hall ranked