Hospitality and Exclusion in the Transnational Spa of Saratoga Springs from the Late Nineteenth into the Twentieth Century

Abstract

The spa, understood here as a resort town offering guests a salubrious retreat into an environment simultaneously natural and urbane, operated over much of the nineteenth and into the twentieth as a transnational social space, a heterotopia in which visitors could enjoy a social environment where the rules of society were relaxed and boundaries eased, yet hardly erased. Yet distinctions between groups remained important, while others were excluded entirely. Broad cultural patterns emerged across national boundaries in this period, in Britain, France, German lands or the United States, tempered by local peculiarities of inclusion and exclusion. This paper seeks to explore how hospitality and exclusion were defined and negotiated at Saratoga Springs, New York. Founded around 1800 as an attempt to establish a resort of culture and refinement, Saratoga in its rise to prominence in the nineteenth century sought in some ways to graft class-based European patterns onto a society that saw itself as more open and egalitarian. Instead, in the second half of the nineteenth century it established limits based less in the boundaries of class than in the discourses of race, ethnicity and settler colonialism that endured well into the twentieth. To explore the transnational context, this paper draws comparisons to the German spa of Baden-Baden, a prominent and cosmopolitan destination that, like Saratoga, rose from obscurity to prominence during the same period and served as a site where elites gathered and negotiations of inclusion and exclusion took place outside the English-speaking world. This choice is intentional to highlight the diffuse and truly transnational nature of the culture of spa hospitality in this period.