Perhaps the most striking quality of satiric literature is its freshness, its originality of perspective. Satire rarely offers original ideas. Instead it presents the familiar in a new form. Satirists do not offer the world new philosophies. What they do is look at familiar conditions from a perspective that makes these conditions seem foolish, harmful or affected. Satire jars us out of complacence into a pleasantly shocked realization that many of the values we unquestioningly accept are false. Don Quixote makes chivalry seem absurd, Brave New World ridicules the pretensions of science, A Modest proposal dramatizes starvation by advocating cannibalism. None of these ideas is original. Chivalry was suspect before Cervantes, humanists objected to the claims of pure science before Aldous Huxley and people were aware of famine before Swift. It was not the originality of the idea that made these satires popular. It was the manner of expression the satiric method that made them interesting and entertaining. Satires are read because they are aesthetically satisfying works of art, not because they are morally wholesome or ethically instructive. They are stimulating and refreshing because with commonsense briskness they brush away illusions and secondhand opinions. With spontaneous irreverence, satire rearranges perspectives, scrambles familiar objects into incongruous juxtaposition and speaks in a personal idiom instead of abstract platitude.

  Satire exists because there is need for it. It has lived because readers appreciate a refreshing stimulus, an irreverent reminder that they lived in a world of platitudinous thinking, cheap moralizing, and foolish philosophy. Satire serves to prod people into an awareness of truth though rarely to any action on behalf of truth. Satire tends to remind people that much of what they see, hear, and read in popular media is sanctimonious, sentimental, and only partially true. Life resembles in only a slight degree the popular image of it. Soldiers rarely hold the ideals that movies attribute to them, nor do ordinary citizens devote their lives to unselfish service of humanity. Intelligent people know these things but tend to forget them when they do not hear them expressed.

Hotels were among the earliest facilities that bound the United States together. They were both creatures and creators of communities, as well as symptoms of the frenetic quest for community. Even in the first part of the nineteenth century, Americans were private, business and pleasure purposes. Conventions were the new occasions, and hotels were distinctively American facilities making conventions possible. The first national convention of a major party to choose a candidate for President (that of the National Republican party, which met on December 12, 1831, and nominated Henry Clay for President) was held in Baltimore, at a hotel that was then reputed to be the best in the country. The presence in Baltimore of Barnum's City Hotel, a six-story building with two hundred apartments helps explain why many other early national political conventions were held there.

  In the longer run, too. American hotels made other national conventions not only possible but pleasant and convivial. The growing custom of regularly assembling from afar the representatives of all kinds of groups - not only for political conventions, but also for commercial, professional, learned, and avocational ones - in turn supported the multiplying hotels. By mid-twentieth century, conventions accounted for over third of the yearly room occupancy of all hotels in the nation, about eighteen thousand different conventions were held annually with a total attendance of about ten million persons.

  Nineteenth-century American hotelkeepers, who were no longer the genial, deferential "hosts" of the eighteenth-century European inn, became leading citizens. Holding a large stake in the community, they exercised power to make it prosper. As owners or managers of the local "palace of the public", they were makers and shapers of a principal community attraction. Travelers from abroad were mildly shocked by this high social position.