Exclusion from the Grand Union Hotel

Joseph Seligman, a New York banker whose firm had floated the Union's war bonds during the Civil War, arrived with his family at the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs, where he had spent every summer. The management refused him entry on the grounds that he was Jewish, and made clear that the policy applied to all Jewish guests. The affair broke in the American press and remained there for weeks. It marks the moment when social exclusion became an openly declared policy in the United States: in the following decades, resort hotels, then clubs, residential neighborhoods, and universities adopted the same clauses. Saratoga Springs is not a massacre; it is the documented starting point of a system.