World’s Fairs

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World’s Fairs

Background. American world’s fairs, also called international expositions, trace their beginnings to London’s 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition, the first world’s fair. This exposition started a tradition of displaying agricultural and mechanical exhibits. The first American international fair was in New York (1853), but it was a financial failure. The success of the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, put together by a group of Philadelphia civic leaders and the federal government, launched the first generation of American world’s fairs.

World’s Columbian Exposition. The Chicago world’s fair of 1893 took place one year after the anniversary it was supposed to commemorate, the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s voyage of discovery to America. It was the largest and most elaborate nineteenth-century exposition held in the United States. After leaving the fairgrounds, an old midwestern farmer reportedly told his wife that it was worth visiting the exposition “even if it did take all the burial money” to do so. The writer Hamlin Garland told his parents: “Sell the cook stove if necessary and come. You must see this fair.” The fair was several years in the

planning, beginning in 1889 when a corporation was established with professional and business leaders who raised more than $10 million in funds. An additional $2.5 million was generated through federally minted souvenir coins. Seven thousand workmen were employed in construction of the six-hundred-acre exposition.

Achievements. The exposition opened 1 May and the Pledge of Allegiance was written for the dedication ceremonies. The landscaping of the grounds and the design of the neoclassical buildings were supervised by a committee composed of the country’s leading architects, especially Daniel Hudson Burnham. However, the architecture of the World’s Columbian Exposition received mixed reviews. Its admirers found it innovative and original, but there were just as many critics who found it a horrible retrogression that turned its back on a distinctively American style. The 150 buildings of Greek, Romanesque, and Renaissance architectural styles became known as the White City; the buildings exhibited the talents of the foremost American architects and sculptors. Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of Central Park and a formidable influence on nineteenth-century landscape architecture, advised fair officials to construct lagoons on the grounds and “not rest content with a view of the lake from the shore.” Another pioneering development was the unprecedented use of electricity at the fair, which impressed upon the American people, for the first time, the importance of this new light source.

Attractions. A department of publicity and promotion established in 1890 advertised the event in eastern cities and Europe. Nineteen foreign countries, eighty-six non-American businesses, and thirty American state governments participated in the fair. The major exhibition buildings (holding approximately sixty-five thousand displays) were grouped by categories—agriculture, anthropology, electricity, fine arts, fisheries, forestry, horticulture, machinery, manufactures and liberal arts, mines and mining, transportation, U.S. government, and women. In an attempt to overcome contemporary prejudice against the Chinese, the Wah Mee Exposition Company built a theater, bazaar, and Chinese temple, or joss house. Special events included a World’s Congress Auxiliary at which nationally known leaders, such as William Jennings Bryan, lectured; a Congress of Historians at which members heard Frederick Jackson Turner read a short version of his essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”; and the World’s Parliament of Religions, at which a weeklong conference was held. Major attractions were the Court of Honor (the central area of the fairgrounds), the Ferris wheel, and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. In the Transportation Building there was an award-winning electric elevator, whose normal speed was 250 feet per minute, to carry visitors to the gallery.

Impact. The exposition closed on 30 October and added much to American life, including the mile-long entertainment strip (midway) which every subsequent fair has incorporated into its planning. Total attendance was 27,529,000, with a profit of $1.4 million. In writing about the event, a modern historian concluded: “For a summer’s moment, White City had seemed the fruition of a nation, a culture, a whole society: the celestial city of man set upon a hill for all the world to behold.”