The Columbian Exposition was scheduled for 1892 to honor the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage, but it opened a year late due to construction delays. Chicago civic leaders lobbied so vociferously to host the fair that New York newspapers disparagingly titled Chicago “the windy city.” Building on successes like the 1876 PHILADELPHIA Centennial Exposition and the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle, the fair was a combination of cultural statement and trade show that epitomized much that was best and worst in American society in the 1890s.
The chosen site was Jackson Park, on the Lake Michigan waterfront south of the Chicago loop. The park had been laid out in 1871 by Olmsted, Vaux & Co. for the Chicago South Park Commission, but the landscape was redesigned by Frederick Law Olmsted for the fair, incorporating a second park and the connecting landscaped “midway” between them. A team of eminent designers, organized by Superintendent of the Works Daniel Burnham, himself a leading Chicago architect, conceived the central court of honor as a Greek or Roman neoclassical city. The vistas of the grand court, with its peristyle and central statue of Columbia, so awed visitors that the neoclassical mode became the style of choice for post offices, courthouses, and major public buildings for the next quarter century. The glistening simulated-stone surfaces gave rise to the name “the white city.” The vision of order and grandeur, so at odds with the grime and confusion of the working Victorian city, inspired a generation of so-called City Beautiful advocates with plans for urban reconstruction around the country.
Behind the formal facades were the buildings, 200 of them on 633 acres, with the largest of them devoted to the products of America’s industrial might. Sixty-two locomotives and complete passenger trains were displayed in the transportation building, whose arched golden portal, designed by Louis SULLIVAN, was the largest exception to the general neoclassicism. The manufactures and liberal arts building, with 38 acres of clear space unimpeded by columns under its steel-framed roof, was the largest building in the world and itself a demonstration of American building technology.
Beyond the industrial displays the visitor encountered the art museum, today rebuilt as the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, the only remaining structure on the site. Prominently situated on the lagoon was the Woman’s Building, the first major building in the United States designed by a woman, 23-year-old SoPHiA G. Hayden, winner of the competition to design the building. Though male architects tried to disparage her, Hayden won three awards for the building. She was the first woman to graduate from the four-year architectural course at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Inside the building were busts of suffrage leaders SusAN B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. On May 15, 1893, the World Congress of Representative Women opened at the fair, with 150,000 women attending its week-long sessions. It had 500 delegates from 27 countries, with 126 organizations represented. Among its speakers were Anthony, Stanton, and Lucy Stone.
Poster for the World's Columbian Exposition, 1893 (Library of Congress)
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Farther away, beyond the state exhibits, was the Midway Plaisance, an amusement area that gives us our term midway. The original Ferris wheel, 250 feet high, held 1,400 people at a time in enclosed cabins. The Midway also held foreign displays, some of which reflected the racism prevalent at the time. The Dahomey Village warriors perpetuated the stereotype of blacks as savages, and billing the Samoan Islanders as “recently rescued from cannibalism” emphasized their reputed appetite for human flesh. The belly dance of “Little Egypt” scandalized and fascinated the nation, and processions from the “primative cultures,” including camels and rickshaws, entered the White City like emissaries of subject powers sent to the new imperial Rome. But exhibits of other non-Westerners including Japanese and Ceylonese temples, a Moroccan mosque, a Chinese theater and tea house, and a Hawaiian volcano were not demeaning.
The fair hosted 27 million visitors, the equivalent of almost half the national population. Frederick Jackson Turner’s talk at the fair reflected a Census Bureau report that the American frontier was now officially closed and with it a whole epoch in American history.
Ironically, the White City, with its vision of order, unity, and imperial domination, took place against a background of social and economic strife. The panic of 1893, marked by business and bank failures, created massive unemployment and led to the Pullman Strike the following year. Thousands of workers living on the exposition grounds during construction were protected from agitators and labor organizers by barbed wire and guards. Aerican Americans were excluded from even the most menial of jobs building and maintaining the fair, and they were provided eating and rest-room facilities only in the Haiti building, provoking Frederick Douglass to call the white city “a whited sepulchre.” When the grounds were turned back to the South Park Commission in 1894, the result was a riot of looting, followed the next day by the first of a series of fires that destroyed the white city and its orderly vision of serenity.
Further reading: Robert Muccigrosso, Celebrating the New World: Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of1893 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993); Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
—Francis H. Parker
World History
