I’m obviously not the only person who was taken with the Columbian Exposition as “few events of the late nineteenth century captured the popular imagination as did the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.” Visitors often described their experiences in the “White City as something unreal.” (1) There is no doubt that the activities of the fair from planning to opening and through the close of the fair changed American culture forever. “The extraordinary responsiveness of visitors, both informed critics and lay public, to the wonders of the White City is highly revealing of American values, anticipations, and aspirations.” (2) The Fair was a merging of industrial achievements with fine art, low and high culture, urban America with the rural frontier.
From the selection of Chicago as the host city, the Columbian Exposition illustrated the blend between homegrown and imported culture. “The city may have been only the nation’s second largest, but in important respects it represented the quintessential American city of its time. Some, including Chicagoans, deplored its rawness, its crudities, its lack of an older, established society; others translated these apparent defects into virtues and praised the city for is preoccupation with success, its dynamic vitality, its openness to change.” (3) While the Exposition boosted national pride, it did even more to boost Chicago’s image to the rank of cosmopolitan city. “Chicago had been certain that it was the most American city in the land and that it was destined to be the nation’s greatest commercial and industrial center. It was sensitive, however, to the charge that it could never be truly great, anymore than a nation or a civilization could be, until it also developed as a center of arts and letters and acquired the refinements of a cultured society and a broader civic spirit.” (4) By all accounts, the Columbian Exposition elevated the international profile of Chicago, softened its image as a purely industrial center and secured itself a place in the world of art and culture.
When Jackson Park was chosen as the site for the Exposition, the architects and planners worried whether they could ever tame the land into any semblance of order. “Land in the Jackson Park area appreciated as much as 1,000 percent in the year following the announcement of the fair’s site. Some of the land that lay partially submerged underwater, and was previous valued at six hundred dollars an acre, now fetched fifteen thousand dollars.” (5)
Perhaps the greatest change the Fair provided was in the way architecture and urban planning were seen. “It primed the whole of America – not just a few rich architectural patrons – to think of cities in a way they never had before.” When the architects chose the neo-classical design style for the buildings in the Court of Honor, the decision was seen as a poor choice, a step back in architectural evolution. “To argue, as some have, that the revival represented the triumph of a foreign culture over an indigenous one is to border on provincialism, if not chauvinism. Like it or not, the United States has always owed much of its cultural heritage to Western traditions, including classicism and neoclassicism, that stemmed from Europe.” (6)
Many of the architects responsible for the Court of Honor buildings, specifically Daniel Burnham, would move on to the redesign of the broader city of Chicago. The White City’s influence on Burnham’s plan for Chicago had more to do with unifying American cities than imposing European ideas upon them. “Architectural unity and magnitude that is in scale, together with unified landscape design, would have enhanced the habitableness of American cities, made them more beautiful, more usable, more congenial, more refined, more coherent, by improving their physical aspect, their physiognomies, and thus transforming them into environments that augmented, rather than fragmented, the quality of life.” (7)
The Exposition was a truly democratizing event, allowing everyone who could afford the price of admission the opportunity to have similar experiences. Many have criticized Fair organizers for including the Midway Plaisance as a lowbrow diversion and a blight on the overall majesty of the fair. “The main purpose of the Midway, after all, was not to separate the classes and their supposedly, conflicting tastes but to keep the exposition afloat financially.” (8) The Midway has been a part of every state fair and carnival but none to this day can rival the Exposition’s. However, most visitors saw the exhibits and displaces on the Midway as mere curiosities. “This is not in any way to depreciate the Midway. The Ferris Wheel alone was remarkable, as actual and symbolic innovation – as a machine revolutionizing the world of amusement. As an arterial link between the exposition and south Chicago’s Washington Park, the Midway was a suitably appealing site of international pleasures and cosmopolitanism.” (9)
Though industry, technology and culture were on wide display throughout the Fair, “view objectively as a symbolic event, the fair does indeed suggest a disordered and confused culture.” (10) Fair organizers were desperate to present as many sides of America as they could to the rest of the world, attempting to portray America a diverse and well-rounded nation. By including as many exhibitions from foreign countries in Court of Honor buildings and on the Midway, the message became mixed between “cultural dependence or independence…Since achieving nationhood Americans had suffered from a sort of schizophrenia, first demanding the creation of a proud, distinctly indigenous art, then looking eastward to Europe for its tastes and artifacts.”(11)
The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 was organized to celebrate Columbus’s 1492 voyage. “It seems ironic that the city of Chicago decided not to celebrate in 1992 the five hundredth anniversary of the voyage of Christopher Columbus to the New World. A century earlier it had jousted fiercely with several other American cities for the privilege (and profit) of hosing the quadricentennial of that fabled event.” (12) The excitement and enthusiasm that surrounded the World’s Fairs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is missing from the world today. Perhaps we should bring back those cultural institutions to show off how just how far the world has come and how far it will go.
(1) Muccigrosso, Robert. Celebrating The New World: Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993, 179.
(2) Burg, David F. Chicago’s White City of 1893. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1976, xiii.
(3) Muccigrosso, 15.
(4) Badger, Reid. The Great American Fair: The World’s Columbian Exposition & American Culture. Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1979,115.
(5) Muccigrosso, 51.
(6) Larson, Erik. The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America. New York: Crown Publishers, 2003,374.
(7) Muccigrosso, 186.
(8) Burg, 303.
(9) Muccigrosso, 192.
(10) Burg, 336.
(11) Badger, 120.
(12) Muccigrosso, 64.
(13) Ibid., ix.
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