Pan-American Exposition

The Pan-American Exposition, the United States’s third international exposition, opened in Buffalo, New York, in May 1901 and ran until November. The City of Buffalo hoped that the gathering would achieve success similar to that of the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876 and the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. Both of these previous expositions elevated the prestige of the nation in the world. Like America’s previous international exhibitions, the Pan-American Exposition showcased the nation’s progress and a utopian view of its industrial and commercial future. Some items on display for the first time were the X-ray machine, an infant incubator, and electric lighting. Buffalo hoped that the Pan-Am would be an economic boon for the region and bring recognition to Buffalo as a modern industrial city.

The construction and architecture of the Pan-Am reflected an attempt to break from past expositions and show the progress and promise of the 20th century. In stark contrast to the iron, brick, and glass buildings of the Centennial Exposition and the neoclassical White City of the Columbian Exposition, the Pan-Am buildings were constructed in a Spanish Renaissance style and painted in a multitude of colors. The buildings of the Rainbow City, designed by Charles Yardley Turner, were painted in colors that began with deep dark hues and progressed toward lighter pastels and grays as they reached the Electric Tower, the visual and technological focal point of the exposition. The use of hydroelectric power to light the buildings, the grounds, and the Electric Tower created an unprecedented display of modern technology.

Building in the Pan-American Exposition lit up by electric current, 1901 (Library of Congress)

The use of color and sculptures and the arrangement of the landscaping reflected a theme of naturalism, but the grounds of the Pan-Am also were intended to symbolize the perceived racial hierarchy among the nations of the world. The grounds were designed to reflect and express a racial view of the evolution of humankind toward modern western civilization. The placement of the lighter colored buildings adjacent to the Electric Tower was intended to suggest that the lighter races, especially the white race, had been most responsible for the advances of modern civilization and human progress.

The events and displays at the Pan-Am also presented a link between race and progress. There were reenactments of the armed battles between the U. S. Cavalry and Native Americans that portrayed them as uncivilized savages. The Ethnology Building was painted gold, considered a primitive color. It contained artifacts that were arranged in ascending order, illustrating the rise of human beings from primitive to modern. Several village displays were set up throughout the grounds. The Mexican, African, and

Japanese villages were built to suggest the primitive state of their cultures when compared to the main buildings such as the Temple of Music, the Government Building, the Machinery and Transportation Building, and the Electricity Building. The Filipino Village was constructed from the perspective of the American empire, suggesting the role its newly acquired colony would play as American influence spread throughout the globe.

The Pan-Am, like the previous expositions, was shaped by contemporary political issues and events. The Spanish-style architecture was intended as a statement of America’s hemispheric solidarity with the nations of Latin America and as a celebration of its new role as a world power. After the Spanish-American War, many business and government leaders viewed the entire Western Hemisphere as America’s legitimate economic and political sphere of influence. Emboldened by its successful defeat of Spain and its possessions in the South Pacific and the Caribbean, the United States directly intervened in Central and Latin American countries. In its design, the Pan-Am Exposition celebrated the new imperial role of the United States.

The Rainbow City, the display of electric lights, and the theatrical presentation of racial hierarchies were overshadowed when on September 6th, during his visit to the exposition, President William McKinley (see Volume VI) was fatally shot by anarchist Leon Czolgosz. Vice President Theodore Roosevelt took office after McKinley’s death. Because of the Pan-Am’s focus on race and the advent of the progressive Roosevelt presidency, the Pan-American Exposition has been seen as a moment of transition for the United States from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era.

See also electricity; foreign policy; invention and technology; Social Darwinism.

Further reading: Thomas Leary and Elizabeth Sholes, Buffalo's Pan American Exposition (Charleston, S. C.: Arcadia Publishing, 1998); Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

—Jeffrey Powell