Looking West From Peristyle, Court of Honor and Grand Basin of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition (Chicago, Illinois). Source: Wikimedia Commons

Shock of the New

The Legacy of the 1893 World’s Fair

05.11.18

The World’s Columbian Exposition opened 125 years ago this month. Known today as the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, it put the emerging United States and its host city on shining display. So, on this episode, Joanne, Ed, and Nathan explore the fairgrounds. They’ll discuss how electric power – a new experience for many Americans – illuminated the White City. And they’ll consider how this presentation of American progress came at a cost.

BONUS
Check out this 3D recreation of the 1893 World’s Fair made by UCLA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSDusnazo8s

1893 World Fair (Columbian Exhibition)

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Segments

Dreaming Bigger

We stretch our legs and explore the exposition’s grounds, a 600 acre ‘fairyland’ featuring everything from lion tamers, to moving sidewalks, to a library featuring every book written by a female author.

Music:

Clair de Lune (Felt Piano, Rhodes, and Drum Machine Arr.) by Podington Bear

Clair de Lune (Synth Arr.) by Podington Bear

Tra-la-la by Podington Bear

1893 World Fair (Columbian Exhibition); Chicago; spectacle

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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FEMALE SPEAKER: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis foundation’s.

ED: From Virginia humanities, this is BackStory. Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Ed Ayers.

NATHAN: I’m Nathan Connolly.

JOANNE: And I’m Joanne Freeman. I thought we’d start today’s show with a little field trip to the shores of Lake Michigan, just south of Chicago in May of 1893. Now, a few months before, it had been a desolate stretch of dunes, marsh, and unfinished construction. But now, it’s the site of the hottest ticket in the country, the 1893 World’s Fair also known as the World’s Columbian Exposition.

MALE SPEAKER: I don’t want to overstretch this, but one of the words that occurs over and over again in the literature is that this is a dream world. It’s a fairyland.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

MALE SPEAKER: Coming to the fair meant that you would experience the best of America as it prepared to enter a new century. I’ve seen photographs of blacks standing in the midst of whites watching lion training, often you know, the fairgrounds in the midway.

FEMALE SPEAKER: And smack in the middle of that was the Temple of Beauty, where 40 young women from, presumably 40 different nations, were all doing a version of the hoochie coochie dance.

MALE SPEAKER: There are no barriers, so the sounds intermix. The smells from different [INAUDIBLE], the extraordinary cuisines from different places on the globe mingle.

MALE SPEAKER: The manufacturers really focused on incredible, awe inspiring demonstrations. So those big towering lights going up into the sky, the buildings are illuminated. The manufacturers would say, we are chaining lightning and we’re harnessing the thunderbolt.

MALE SPEAKER: There are multiple stories of people just passing out because of the– they’re just overwhelmed by everything.

JOANNE: There were 600 acres of spectacular gardens, grand exhibition halls, so-called exotic people on display, and mechanical wonders, including a quarter of a million electric lights and the very first Ferris wheel. By the time the fair closed in October of that year, it’s estimated that as many as one in four Americans had come through the fairground gates. And what they saw when they came, well, that left quite an impression.

MALE SPEAKER: Dead ahead are going to be these extraordinary buildings. They were called palaces, exposition palaces, dedicated to the liberal arts, dedicated to the administration of the fair, dedicated to the US government. They’re stuffed full of displays from around the world. And it’s not a quiet place. It is loud. There is band music being played. There are people jostling one another. There are kids running in multiple directions being corralled by their parents.

ED: But not every attraction was family friendly. The World’s Fair was about the loftiest human ideals, but also about the basest human desires.

FEMALE SPEAKER: The hoochie coochie dance was what we would think was fairly close to a strip tease, where a woman who was partially dressed would move around a lot of veils and titillate the male audience with the display of her body.

JOANNE: Even just getting around the fair could be exciting.

MALE SPEAKER: Transportation from one part of the other to the fair would have been by electricity. As you came through the gates, you would take a tram, a trolley car. If it was across the lagoon, you would have ridden in an electric boat. There also were a couple of places moving sidewalks like we have in the airports today.

JOANNE: The fairgrounds were designed to showcase the best of what the United States had to offer. Designers had looked to the past as well. It was meant to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in America. But those moving sidewalks and the silent trolleys were all headed towards a new future.

MALE SPEAKER: People went to the Columbian Exposition to see themselves and not just to hold up a mirror to see what they and others look like. They also held up a looking glass to step through. All of this gives an inkling, some brief inkling, of what the United States is going to look like as it moves forward in time.

JOANNE: Those were the voices of historians Robert Riedel, Christopher Reid, Bernie Carlson, and Tracy Jean Boisseau. We’ll be hearing from them all throughout the episode.

ED: We’ll be exploring the fair’s mixture of high culture and democratic energy, from the famous midway, to the very heart of the exposition, the massive court of honor, with its huge white buildings doubled in a reflecting pool. We’ll also visit exhibitions dedicated to women, the country of Haiti, and electricity. And we’ll hear stories of how the fair showcased a new, modern America, even if that version of progress didn’t include all Americans.

Electric Feel

If there was one thing uniting the various exhibits at the fair, it was electricity. Historian Bernie Carlson sits down with Ed to talk about how the exhibition helped launch electricity and electric devices into American homes and cities.

Music:

Lift Off by Jahzzar

1893 World Fair (Columbian Exhibition); Chicago; electricity; spectacle; technological innovation

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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But first, we’re going to explore the current running through the fair, electricity. You just couldn’t avoid it. Not only was there a whole building dedicated to electricity, featuring electric devices from cigar cutters to toasters to farm equipment, but electric light was everywhere. At night, every building in the White City would have glowed inside and out, thanks to hundreds of thousands of arc lights and light bulbs. Elevators swept visitors up to rooftop promenades and restaurants. Spotlights reached the sky while silent electric trolleys, boats, and moving sidewalks whisked visitors around the fairgrounds.

For many of the estimated 27 million Americans who passed through the fair’s gates, this may have been their first encounter with electric power. It was certainly the first time any of the attendees would have seen electricity used on such a grand scale. Here’s Bernie Carlson again.

BERNIE CARLSON: For the average person, if you had electricity at all, which wasn’t particularly likely, you would have to be like JP Morgan in the 1880s. And you wanted the newfangled Edison electric light, he had to basically install a steam engine, a generator, wires in his house, and then ultimately the light bulbs, which actually went in where you used to have the gas fixtures. And that was noisy, to have a steam engine running in your basement. It was expensive and it was dangerous. And in fact, the electricity basically burned through the insulation and set fire to the drapes in one of the rooms. And it illustrates that this was really a high risk, expensive venture and not for everybody.

ED: So what happens between JP Morgan’s ill fated home and the wonderful quarter of a million light bulbs that actually make the White City white?

BERNIE CARLSON: So what happens is the organizers of the Chicago World’s Fair decide early on that electricity is going to be one of the central themes of the fair, and that they see it as a way of accomplishing what Daniel Burnham, the director works for the fair, said is, make no little plans, they have no magic to stir men’s blood. And so from the get go, they committed to electricity and you know, basically asked big companies, like Westinghouse from Pittsburgh, or the General Electric company, to compete and bid on the fair, with the expectation right from the get go that it was going to be fully electrified.

ED: And you’ve got one out of every four Americans coming to this fair.

BERNIE CARLSON: Exactly. Yeah.

ED: That’s an incredible thing. What’s the experience of electricity that people would have when they come to the fair?

BERNIE CARLSON: First and foremost, the manufacturers really focused on incredible, awe inspiring demonstrations. So the honor court is all aglow. You see those thousands of electric lights lighting up the buildings. They’ve got, you know, those big towering lights going up into the sky. The buildings are illuminated. The General Electric company asked Edison to create an 82 foot tower of light with thousands of lights up and down the column, and an eight foot light at the top, which had 30,000 little prisms that were red, white, and blue, because remember this is America. This is patriotism. And at night, the top bulb rotated around and so you’d have these glittering red and blue images like off a disco ball.

ED: I’d love to see that.

BERNIE CARLSON: Yeah. Yeah. And that created a sense of wonder in people, like oh my god, look at the aesthetic things that we can do with electricity. I think two things that the inventors and the manufacturers really implicitly, when you look back, you know, play up. And you know, one theme is wonder. And the other is really democratizing luxury. I mean, if you think about even kings and queens didn’t have the sort of convenience that comes very quickly with electricity. People in this period were like, oh my god, life is going to be entirely different. So like one of the great phrases is the manufacturers would say we are chaining lightning and we’re harnessing the thunderbolt.

ED: That sounds dangerous.

BERNIE CARLSON: It sounds dangerous. And boys and girls, it is. At the same time, people were amazed that AT&T was there. And they had nice, neat, female operators. And those operators were routinely placing long distance calls between Chicago and New York or Boston. And people were just blown away by that idea that you could have a phone call that it was happening for 1,500 miles. People were also, in terms of wonderment, just completely fascinated that Edison demonstrated his first motion picture machine, the kinetochore scope. And people would peer into this box and they would see various things.

I mean, one of the very earliest films was a guy sneezing. Now, that wouldn’t do much for us, but that was the equivalent of special effects at that time.

ED: Yeah, right.

BERNIE CARLSON: So all these things said to people, look at all the possibilities. Look at how wonderful electricity is going to be.

ED: It’s interesting looking back on it. We don’t think of all those things as electricity, right?

BERNIE CARLSON: That’s right.

ED: We think of a film or we think of telephone, but we don’t think of it as all being powered by the same thing.

BERNIE CARLSON: Right, yeah. So Edison’s Kinetoscope thing, if you were to open that box, you got an electric light. You’ve got an electric motor. And so this was another application of electricity, and in ways that people had– you know, no preconception before came up with that.

ED: And these things all emerged in just a few years.

BERNIE CARLSON: Exactly, exactly. I mean, you know, essentially, again as I often tell people, remember that in the mid-1870s you the telephone is introduced in 1876 and 1878. Edison starts showing his phonograph, in 1879 he invents the incandescent light. I mean, you know, that is an incredible amount of disruptive technology in less than five years.

ED: But they don’t really come to fruition till 1893.

BERNIE CARLSON: Right, that’s where the engineers–

ED: You can see them all in one place.

BERNIE CARLSON: Right. Yeah. But that’s where the engineers, the manufacturers, the business people all have to take those inventions and shape them into commercially viable products. And you know, this book that I brought with me has–

ED: It’s a very impressive book.

BERNIE CARLSON: Right.

ED: Tell us about this book.

BERNIE CARLSON: It is about 700 or 800 pages, titled The World’s Columbian Exposition Chicago 1893. The book really walks you through the major exhibits. My favorite passage at the end of this chapter about all the things that electricity can do is this. And it says, besides these will be found in endless profusion exhibits of wires and cables, copper in all forms for electrical purposes, instruments for measuring the current in various ways, and motors push buttons and bells. In fact, every known appliance for any and every purpose. In truth it can be said that a house could, from the contents of the electricity building, be so completely equipped electrically, that there would not be the slightest necessity for lighting a match in it from one year’s end to the next.

ED: Wow, no matches.

BERNIE CARLSON: No matches. That’s your horseless carriage. That’s the future.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOANNE: Bernie Carlson is a historian of technology at the University of Virginia and the author of Tesla, Inventor of the Electric Age.

Woman’s Pavilion

Women’s groups successfully lobbied for an exhibit to showcase their accomplishments at the end of the 19th century. But Tracey Jean Boisseau says that women like Susan B. Anthony wanted the building to do more.

Music:

Dunes by Podington Bear

1893 World Fair (Columbian Exhibition); Chicago; gender

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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JOANNE: The World’s Columbian Exposition pulsed with the idea of innovation and modernity. On one hand, visitors could marvel at technological advances like the electric gleam of the White City. But fair organizers wanted to put American social progress on display as well. That included the question of what the future would look like for women.

NATHAN: In the lead up to the fair, women’s groups lobbied hard for official space and representation at the exposition. The result was the woman’s building.

TRACY JEAN BOISSEAU: The building’s purpose was specifically and precisely explicitly to locate women within the modern world. Tracy Jean Boisseau is a historian at Purdue University.

TRACY JEAN BOISSEAU: Even in its own moment, it was perceived by visitors, commentators on the fair, as one of the most innovative aspects of this particular exposition.

NATHAN: That’s because Chicago was the first World’s Fair to dedicate an entire exhibit to the achievements of the so-called fairer sex. Women also played key roles in developing the space major decisions were made by the board of Lady Managers. And the structure itself was designed by a woman, 21-year-old Sophia Hayden.

TRACY JEAN BOISSEAU: Most women talk about how proud they were to realize women’s accomplishments. The building would have been filled with evidence of women’s contribution to the modern world, their contributions to industrial innovation, to technology. So there are lawyers, and there are authors, and a library, a women’s library that had about 7,000 volumes in it. This was an attempt to collect a copy of all of the books authored by women gathered in one place.

NATHAN: So this sounds like a uniformly positive idea in all the contributions as you’ve outlined. But I have to imagine that there was some debate about the woman’s building.

TRACY JEAN BOISSEAU: Oh yes, it was not uniformly positive, not between different groups of women and not even within any one demographic of women.

NATHAN: Behind the scenes, women’s groups vied for power and representation. Black women, for example, were largely excluded. But the most high profile fight was waged over control of the exhibit, pitting the wealthy socialites of Chicago, like Board of Lady Managers president, Bertha Palmer, against more radical women, like Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

TRACY JEAN BOISSEAU: Those two groups battled over whether or not the women’s building should be all about demanding more political rights for women, especially in terms of the public sphere, or whether or not it should be merely a celebration of women’s status as it was at that moment in the United States. For the most part, Bertha Palmer wins out with that.

NATHAN: So tell me about Bertha Palmer.

TRACY JEAN BOISSEAU: Well, Bertha Palmer was very comfortable in the limelight. She was not the power behind the throne. She very much wanted to be the power in the throne. And I use the term throne advisedly because she often was referred to as the queen of the fair. Or she talks about herself as a queen. She was very hands on in the decision making with everything to do with the women’s building. So Bertha Palmer gets to get her say out in lots of different ways. But there are so many other voices that find a way in.

NATHAN: So you’ve got, it sounds like, a debate or a set of conversations about the state of women at the fair, but also in the late 19th century.

TRACY JEAN BOISSEAU: Exactly. So for instance, once Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other suffragists and women’s rights advocates were excluded from the organizing of the women’s building, they formed their own rival association and did everything they could to undermine the Board of Lady Managers.

NATHAN: Wow.

TRACY JEAN BOISSEAU: So they formed what they called the Queen Isabella association. So they tried to sort of raise her up as the female equivalent of Columbus in the discovery. They erect a statue, have the sculpture itself in its own pavilion. And then hold a series of political speeches and exhibits there in an attempt to present a more radical, or at least politicized, messaging. So I think that having that Isabella statue was in your face, Bertha Palmer, in a really productive way.

NATHAN: So you’ve got this debate that’s happening. Is it safe to say that the architecture and the presence, and just the fact of the woman’s building in real, hard stone, that that reflects some kind of resolution in the sense that you’re going to take something away from the fair about women and their contributions simply by virtue of the fact that this magnificent building is there at the fair?

TRACY JEAN BOISSEAU: Absolutely. And that’s what we see in women’s comments in magazines and in newspaper coverage. But I think that all of the contests for power tell us more than anything how important this opportunity was. There was no other opportunity, no other venue open to women at this moment in the 19th century to come together and to see each other. So it shouldn’t surprise us to see as much contention as we see because there was a lot at stake. This event becomes a huge, important moment for women’s organizing. And that’s what we see more than anything else, I think.

And I think it’s on display most obviously in the women’s Congress, the Congress of representative women that’s held for a week at the outset of the fair.

NATHAN: What was that?

TRACY JEAN BOISSEAU: So the Congress of Representative Women, often just referred to as the Congress of Women, was the biggest, most important gathering of women who were both professional or high profile in some way, often for their politics. There were about 150,000 women in attendance over the course of just six days to hear over 300 different speeches by prominent women that they would have heard of that would have been in the national press. But the Congress was not micromanaged by Bertha Palmer or the Board of Lady Managers.

And so inevitably these speeches were more than simply applause for women’s achievement, but in actual claims on the public sphere and claims on more political rights and women’s suffrage.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Fun Fair

Historian Robert Rydell illustrates the impact of the Midway Plaisance, a mile-long avenue designed as the entertainment section of the fair. Visitors could enjoy the newly invented Ferris Wheel or visit a series of villages displaying people from around the globe.

Music:

The Streets of Cairo or the Poor Little Country Maid
Welcome Back by Ketsa

1893 World Fair (Columbian Exhibition); Chicago; exoticism; performance; racism

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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JOANNE: The women’s building sat near the entrance of what was known as the midway. Here’s historian Robert Riedel, who we heard from earlier in the show.

ROBERT RIEDEL: The midway, technically the Midway Plays On set, the Chicago fair, was a mile avenue of fun, instruction, frolic all rolled into one.

ED: At its heart was a 290 foot tall revolving wheel named after its inventor, George Ferris. The Ferris wheel, now a carnival staple, was the midway star attraction. But wait there’s more. Fair-goers could wander among a series of outdoor museums, ethnological villages that displayed people from around the globe. The term village wasn’t just a nice way to gloss over what was, in essence, a kind of human zoo, people lived there.

ROBERT RIEDEL: There’s an Algerian palace, a Tunis village. The African village was called the Dahomean Village after Dahomey. There are Chinese villages, a Javanese village. There are food concessions, there are breweries. There’s a German village, an Austrian village, Japanese bazaar. It’s just an extraordinarily lively place. And I guess it’s usually something that people, if they know about it, they think about what it looked like. But I think it’s so important to understand what it sounded like.

The music ranged from every quarter of the globe, although it’s interesting that time for most commentators, people from Africa and the Middle East didn’t play music so much has produce sound or noise. Music came from the Austrian village and the German village. There are no barriers. So the sounds intermix. The smells from the different [INAUDIBLE], the extraordinary cuisines from different places on the globe mingle. It was one of these just surround sound places where one could exercise all of the senses from sight to sound to touch, because in these ethnological villages it was not uncommon for visitors to go up and try to actually touch, sometimes quite inappropriately, people who were deemed as savages or primitives.

TRACY JEAN BOISSEAU: Visitors had the idea they were stepping into a sort of primitive zone or an exotic backward set of cultures.

JOANNE: That’s Tracy Jean Boisseau again.

TRACY JEAN BOISSEAU: And so you see lots of things like the hoochie coochie dance.

NATHAN: Hoochie coochie dance, what’s that?

TRACY JEAN BOISSEAU: The hoochie coochie dance was what we would think was fairly close to a strip tease, where a woman who was partially dressed would move around a lot of veils and titillate the male audience with the display of her body.

ROBERT RIEDEL: It was called the danse du ventre, translated the belly dance. And there’s a little theme song for the belly dancers to dance to. And it was called the hoochie coochie.

JOANNE: Well, now that you’ve mentioned that, you’re going to have to hum it.

ROBERT RIEDEL: Well, you probably don’t want me to, but it goes something like this, [HUMMING] My humming is not so good but I think you get the drift.

TRACY JEAN BOISSEAU: This was a dance that was imagined as representing all of the Middle East in its exotic, oriental splendor. And it was performed by several different women, actually. But they were often imagined as one woman who was referred to as little Egypt.

JOANNE: The hoochie coochie dancers were actually the entertainment at the Algerian village, and they were a huge hit, much to the annoyance of onlookers at the nearby woman’s building.

TRACY JEAN BOISSEAU: If you sat on the rooftop deck of the women’s building, which millions of women over the course of the five or six months of the fair did, you had a view not only to the court of honor in the White City, but in the other direction you had a view directly over the midway. And smack in the middle of that was the Temple of Beauty, where 40 young women from, presumably, 40 different nations were all doing a version of the hoochie coochie dance. And so there was lots of conversation and lots of criticism about, sort of, the terrible, salacious things that were happening in their sightline on the midway.

ROBERT RIEDEL: How interesting that the woman’s building, one of these quite large neoclassical buildings is put right at– it hinges the midway to the White City, as if white middle class women are really supposed to be the arbiters between something called civilization and something called savagery.

JOANNE: Reidel says the scandalous, entertaining midway was supposedly educational.

ROBERT RIEDEL: One of the chief purposes of the fair was to show the rest of the world, here meaning New York City, that Chicago was as civilized as any east coast city, and certainly as any Parisian capital. So civilization, culture, both spelled with a capital C, were animating drives. So the midway itself was not necessarily considered a primary part of the fair at the beginning. But as it became clear that the fair was going to cost a lot of money to put on, it was clear that these sorts of exhibits, these villages, and these concessions with food and beer, actually were moneymakers.

So the midway takes form in a curious way because the exposition directors did not want it to detract from capital C culture, capital C civilization. They want at the midway to augment it and to be an educational strip, to be a kind of outdoor ethnological museum. So they affixed it in the exposition catalog and gave it a department letter, department m, which was also the category in which anthropology was placed.

JOANNE: So it’s sort of adding a humanity component to this larger cultural experience.

ROBERT RIEDEL: Well, it’s a humanity component but it’s a humanity with a particular vision attached to it. In particular, hierarchical ways that reinforce the dominant ways of thinking about people from foreign colonies and even internal colonies like American Indian reservations.

JOANNE: And how did they communicate that particular message about ranking peoples?

ROBERT RIEDEL: Well, let me come at that question in a couple of ways. One of the ways that this message got communicated was through the organization of midway’s shows. So at one extreme, remember, the midway’s a mile long. So at one extreme of the midway, the farthest from the White City, you have the Dahomean village, the American Indian villages. And then one could make one’s way towards the White City, passing the Austrian village, passing the Middle Eastern villages, the German village. So in a sense, as the newspapers described it, one could follow the spiral of evolution from its most primitive and barbaric towards civilisation, heading towards the White City.

So that’s one way that this message gets conveyed. And the other is contractual. And so for the Dahomeans, the Africans who perform at the fair, their contract very explicitly states that they are to perform as savages. And when it becomes apparent time in the eyes of the concessionaire, who is a Frenchman of sort of dubious background, when his concession isn’t making quite as much money as he thinks it should, he concludes that it’s because his performers aren’t being, in quotes now, “savage enough.” So he basically forces them to drink beer from the brewery next door on the other side.

JOANNE: So staged, carefully staged lessons about the supposed change in civilization.

ROBERT RIEDEL: Oh, yes. Yes, they’re very carefully staged. And at the same time, it’s just so interesting to see how that careful staging sometimes collapses under its own weight because the people who are there to perform, the entrepreneurs and the fair managers might have seen them as specimens. But the people who are there to perform are actually pretty adept at counteracting the intentions of fair organizers. And that gets to be a pretty interesting story as well.

JOANNE: Well, so what did some of those people do?

ROBERT RIEDEL: Well, And I’ll just stick with the African village for a moment. So every day the so-called denizens of the midway would organize an ethnological parade and they would start at the far end of the midway and March towards the White City. And as several scholars have noted, the Africans would, as they paraded, would chant in their own languages. And they would sing songs. And there would actually happen to be someone from West Africa, a European who claimed that he understood what the West Africans were saying. And it was something along the lines of, well, please come to Dahomey and we’ll slit your white throats.

So the Midway’s and these representations are just– they’re remarkably interesting and remarkably complex, and really underscore the importance of why historians study these cultural representations and why they matter so much.

JOANNE: It’s so fascinating because the mix of entertainment and really deep statements is such a strange brew of things to yoke together. And yet obviously, it’s a strong combination that pulls people.

ROBERT RIEDEL: Oh yes, absolutely. And it’s going to continue with subsequent fairs. It’s not– remember, there’s a tradition of fairs before Chicago. And there’s certainly a tradition of fairs that comes after Chicago. So by locating the midway with really a lot of fun, somewhat maybe really sleazy performances and calling them ethnological villages, and you can go watch the hoochie coochie dance and say, oh no, I’m going there to learn about different cultures.

JOANNE: I’m studying a culture.

ROBERT RIEDEL: I’m studying the culture. By actually suggesting that the midway could have this higher, nobler, educational purpose is terrifically important because it basically sets in motion an argument you’re going to hear across the 20th century, that education of course can and should be entertaining.

JOANNE: Well, that actually leads me to maybe my last question here, which is, what would you say is the legacy of the midway?

ROBERT RIEDEL: Oh my. The legacy of the midway is– it’s not a single legacy. There are multiple legacies tied to the power of media, and this is a prototype mass media, how it can inform the way people think. And then maybe the most compelling legacy for your listeners might well be in the context of what is about to be built pretty much right where that midway [? Plaisance ?] intersected with the White City. And what is about to be built I think everyone in Chicago will know, is President Obama’s library. And so if you think about the midway and you think about the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition as this vehicle for disseminating some really quite horrible ideas about African-Americans and people of color around the world, I think it’s really quite a tribute to the legacy of resistance that the Obama library is going to be right where the White City once stood.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOANNE: Robert Riedel is a historian at Montana State University. We also heard from Tracy Jean Boisseau. She’s a historian at Purdue University and co-editor of Gendering the Fair Histories of Women and Gender at World’s Fairs.

The Haytian Pavilion

While African Americans were excluded from the planning of the fair, they found community and identity in an unexpected place. Historian Christopher Reed tells Nathan about how Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and other black fairgoers congregated at the Haitian Pavilion.

Music:

Vanagon by Podington Bear

Sun of the Most High by Ketsa

1893 World Fair (Columbian Exhibition); Chicago; Haiti; race

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

ED: One thing you wouldn’t find on the fairgrounds was a building solely devoted to African-Americans. That was the case even though in the 30 years since the end of slavery, African-Americans had made major gains in law, medicine, technology, and the arts.

NATHAN: Considering the overall theme of the fair was progress, the exclusion of an exhibit explicitly dedicated to the advances of African-Americans was a slap in the face to many. But there was little they could do about it.

CHRISTOPHER REID: It’s similar to 21st century America, if you don’t have backers or you don’t control wealth, then you won’t be heard.

NATHAN: Historian Christopher Reid.

CHRISTOPHER REID: And then, of course, if you throw in the issue of race, you’ve got a double handicap. The result was, you had a rich man’s event presented to the global public in 1893.

NATHAN: But exclusion was an insult that would not be tolerated. Prominent black activists decided to write a pamphlet they would circulate to fair goers. Contributors included Frederick Douglass and journalists Ida B Wells.

FEMALE SPEAKER: The exhibit of the progress made by a race in 25 years of freedom, as against 250 years of slavery, would have been the greatest tribute to the greatness and progressiveness of the American institutions, which could have been shown the world. The colored people of this great republic number eight millions, more than 1/10 of the whole population of the United States.

CHRISTOPHER REID: And that same pamphlet had a another 20 page essay on the achievements of African-Americans as inventors, educators, political participants, as good citizens.

MALE SPEAKER: We earnestly desire to show some results of our first 30 years of acknowledged manhood and womanhood, wherein we have failed it has not been our fault but our misfortune. And it is sincerely hoped that this brief story not only of our successes but of trials and failures, our hopes and disappointments will relieve us of the charge of indifference and indolence.

NATHAN: Douglass and Wells were both at the fair. And you could find them at the one place where there was an official black presence, the Haitian pavilion.

CHRISTOPHER REID: The government of Haiti built a pavilion and it was the first structure constructed on the fairgrounds. And their building was built near the building from the United Kingdom, from the building from France, from Sweden, from Germany. And so to have that building on the fairgrounds gave African-Americans the opportunity to say, look at what black people have done.

And from that building, Frederick Douglass held sway as the voice of the Haitian people, and in the man, and as a black American he was also the voice of black America.

NATHAN: Haiti has selected Douglas as a representative because he had been US Minister to Haiti. And as the only country that had liberated itself from slavery and remained free, the Haitian pavilion embodied black progress to many African-American fair goers.

CHRISTOPHER REID: So the building was quite similar to the pavilions or structures that other nations built, not as elaborate, but it was a one story structure, ornate on the outside with, I’m assuming, elaborate furnishings inside so that people who visit it would be impressed with what Haiti wanted to be on the world scene. Whites felt comfortable coming into the movie and standing outside the pavilion, the same with African-Americans. It was a pleasant experience to go to the pavilion, see the pavilion, have cultural interchange with Frederick Douglass, and perhaps even hear his grandson play the violin inside the pavilion.

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NATHAN: Haitian coffee was served to visitors and the pavilion had an ambience of sophistication with Haitian and French influence.

CHRISTOPHER REID: Furniture and the paintings and the flora would have all been something that white Americans would have easily recognized as representative of a nation that was modern.

NATHAN: So not a lot of indigenous work, then, from local Haitians?

CHRISTOPHER REID: No, not really. There was not an indigenous reflection of Haiti. For example, the there was no connection between the people of Dahomey, the fine people of Dahomey, who had populated Haiti as slaves, no connection between the pavilion and them. And they were located about a mile west of the pavilion on the midway plaisance.

NATHAN: Now Frederick Douglass, in some of his speeches at the Haitian pavilion, will explicitly invoke the Dahomey village, won’t he?

CHRISTOPHER REID: Frederick Douglass had great disdain for the presence of the Dahomeans. Frederick Douglass, who was of mixed heritage, he was very modern and had nothing good to say about Dahomey village. And he did not speak about it on a regular basis. It did come up, from time to time, and there’s a famous statement he made about not measuring Negroes of the 1890s against the barbarism to be seen down at Dahomey village. He was quite conscious, as were many black Americans in the early 20th century, that the only way to prove worthiness to white Americans was to distance themselves from the image of Africa and the white man.

NATHAN: So Professor Reid, give me a sense of what African-Americans did to try to get to the fair. How many of them might have been able to get there? And what was their experience once they arrived on the fairgrounds?

CHRISTOPHER REID: Once African-Americans heard that there was going to be a World’s Fair and that they would be included to some extent, perhaps not meeting their fondest expectations, but they would be welcomed in Chicago, by the thousands they made plans to travel by railroad to Chicago. And the railroads accommodated their desires by having group fares. And some black entrepreneurs in the city even built some structures to house visitors to the city. Coming to Chicago meant you were free and you could see the best of America. The fair offered spaciousness, electric lighting, flush toilets, food samples.

I’ve seen photographs of blacks standing in the midst of whites watching lion training, often you know the fairgrounds in the midway. When people didn’t enjoy themselves on the fairgrounds, they visited black churches and black homes, and took advantage of the hospitality afforded in those venues. By the way, a group met in Chicago during the fair and made plans to run a black man for president, which was done in 1904. And over eight days, there was a conference sponsored by the nation’s congregationalists to discuss the matter of leaving America for Africa, or remaining here, making this a better place to live.

The final decision by the man who was to marry Ida B Wells was, we’re going to stay and continue to improve conditions in this country for everyone.

NATHAN: So Professor Reid, being from Chicago, knowing the South side, do you ever go down to the old midway or see yourself on the former fairgrounds and imagine what it was like then?

CHRISTOPHER REID: Oh yes, yes. I’ve done that many times. I live near the fairgrounds. And I have quite an imagination, being an historian. I’ve often thought what it would have been like to have ridden on the 1,000-plus seat Ferris wheel. Then on the other hand, I’m afraid of heights. I would have enjoyed myself had I been there in 1893.

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NATHAN: Christopher Reid is Professor emeritus of history at Roosevelt University and the author of All the World is Here The Black Presence at White City.

Old Time Religion

The Parliament of the World’s Religions, bringing together many of the world’s faiths, was held in conjunction with the fair. Scholar Matt Hedstrom says that two speakers unexpectedly became the stars of the show: Hindu Swami Vivekananda and Buddhist Anagarika Dharmapala.

Music:

Enrichment by Podington Bear

Lunis the Moon by Ketsa

Logjam by Podington Bear

Toy Weapons II by Jahzzar

Releasing the Sculpture by Podington Bear

Moon Love by Ketsa

1893 World Fair (Columbian Exhibition); Chicago; religion

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

ED: Our last stop on our tour of the World’s Columbian Exposition takes us several miles off the fairgrounds to downtown Chicago. Today, the Art Institute of Chicago is a world renowned museum. It’s also one of the few remaining buildings that was used during the exposition. In 1893, the Institute served as an auxiliary meeting hall for a series of conventions called congresses.

MATT HEADSTROM: The congresses were the intellectual side of the fair.

ED: This is scholar Matt Headstrom. He says these congresses were devoted to all manner of subjects, things such as the arts, manufacturing, and medicine.

MATT HEADSTROM: And they were all designed to showcase, look how far we’ve come. Look at the state of the art in these various fields. Look at the contribution of American civilization to these forms of knowledge.

ED: The capstone of these congresses was one dedicated to faith, the parliament of the world’s religions. Held in September near the tail end of the fair, the session brought together religious figures from around the globe. The local host and most attendees were English speaking Protestants. Catholic and Jewish representatives made the trip as well.

MATT HEADSTROM: But there were a significant number of Buddhists and Hindus, smaller numbers of Muslims, Jains, representatives Shinto from Japan. Sometimes they were called the enlightened heathens, those who were not Christians but who had civilization, who had great ideas to contribute.

ED: The Congress was the fulfillment of a dream articulated a year before by Chicago minister John Henry Barrows, president of the parliament. In front of a huge crowd at New York’s Madison Square Garden, he had outlined his vision.

MALE SPEAKER: For the first time in history, the representatives of the leading historic faiths will meet in fraternal conference over the great things of human life and destiny.

MATT HEADSTROM: I mean, on the one hand, it was a progressive’s vision of bringing representatives of the great world religions together to come to understand each other.

MALE SPEAKER: I have no doubt that this phenomenal meeting will make apparent the fact that there is a certain unity in religion. That is, that men not only have common desires and needs, but also have perceived more or less clearly certain common truths.

MATT HEADSTROM: And yet Barrows was also a Christian minister who had a very clear sense of a kind of hierarchy of culture, a hierarchy of civilizations. He was a Darwinist, and so had a sort of evolutionary understanding of the trajectory of history, and very clearly understood Christianity is sort of standing at the apex of civilization, the way the White City was.

ED: He even celebrated the attendance of the so-called enlightened heathens.

MATT HEADSTROM: He talks about the full sun and the twilight. And he sees basically the illumination of Christianity offering up visions of truth in its full, standing in full daylight. The other great religions had truths to share but they were sort of dimmed, so he described them as in the twilight. It’s not bad. It’s not wrong. It’s just not fully developed. So in that sense, like the other congresses, it’s like, what’s the state of the art in finance? What’s the state of the art in engineering?

Well, what’s the state of the art in religion? It’s progressive, Protestant Christianity.

MALE SPEAKER: America will be on exhibition the coming year, and especially American Christianity. You have an opportunity of influencing the whole world with the spirit of our common Christianity without parallel in ancient or modern times.

MATT HEADSTROM: That is the most modern, the most up to date, and the completest form of religion. And he thought the parliament would ultimately demonstrate that.

ED: But it didn’t really pan out that way.

MATT HEADSTROM: Because some of the other participants didn’t quite play their assigned roles.

ED: Two participants, in particular, Hindu Swami Vivekananda from India, and Buddhist Anagarika Dharmapala from Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. Both men had been educated by Westerners. They understood their audience far more than their audience understood them.

MATT HEADSTROM: Vivekananda was, by all accounts, a spectacular showman. And many consider him to be the kind of star of the show, somebody who was just a spellbinding speaker who had that kind of it factor as an orator.

ED: That it factor was on full display the very first day of the parliament. Reportedly, Swami Vivekananda said just five words in greeting, sisters and brothers of America, and the crowd burst into applause for several minutes. Audience members were enthralled by the swami in his orange robes and yellow turban.

MATT HEADSTROM: He was playing the role of the monk from the east, with the wisdom from an ancient culture and an ancient civilization. And he knew how to play to Westerners’ expectations of what someone in that capacity should look like and sound like. And he played it perfectly. So he could speak the language of the fair and the language of the parliament of religions, the language of progress, the language of modernity, the language of the compatibility of science and philosophy with religious wisdom. He simply thought that a kind of hierarchy of civilizations that said Christianity had the full illumination and others groped, not in darkness, but in twilight, was inaccurate.

ED: And that this particular Christian attitude had a negative impact on his people. Vivekananda was an outspoken Indian Nationalist. In fact, today he’s considered a spiritual father of modern India.

MATT HEADSTROM: And so he was deeply critical of the ways in which he thought that Christian theological claims to a kind of an exclusive hold on truth facilitated Christian, in his case, British imperialism.

ED: So Vivekananda used his platform at the Congress to preach a message of spiritual equality. He believed that all religions were manifestations of the divine. That first day of the parliament, he told the assembled crowd–

MALE SPEAKER: The present convention, which is one of the most august assemblies ever held, is in itself a vindication, a declaration to the world of the most wonderful doctrine preached in the Gita. Whosoever comes to me through whatever form, I reach him.

MATT HEADSTROM: This is the way he could bring that message and subtly subvert the kind of hierarchies that were quite present from the Christian point of view in the parliament.

ED: His message was well received, as was Anagarika Dharmapala’s. Dharmapala didn’t have the same star wattage of his contemporary, but like Vivekananda, he understood what fairgoers were looking for.

MATT HEADSTROM: He presented Buddhism in terms that I think are very familiar to those of us in the 21st century west. In a sense, as the fulfillment of a dream that is simply a philosophy of mind. He said, theology is a way of thinking that represents the past and the future will be about philosophy and psychology. And if that’s the case, then Buddhism is better positioned to lead us into that future than Christianity is. Christianity requires belief in all kinds of supernatural, historical events. He said, we Buddhists, we don’t need that.

ED: His message found a ready and immediate audience.

MATT HEADSTROM: He very famously took a convert.

ED: A man named CT Strauss became the first public convert to Buddhism on American soil. His conversion reportedly left his Jewish family at a loss. As a newspaper put it, they could not understand his move toward the effete religious mysticism of the east.

MATT HEADSTROM: This was not the way things are supposed to work. Asians don’t come to the United States as missionaries. And here was Dharmapala taking an American convert on the streets of Chicago in 1893.

ED: Headstrom says it’s not as if thousands of Americans immediately followed in Strauss’ footsteps, but he argues that it does mark a shift in American religious consciousness. Vivekananda and Dharmapala found a spiritually hungry audience at the World’s Fair. When it was over, they both set up learning centers for their faiths in cities across the United States.

MATT HEADSTROM: So for the first time if you were an American, what we might today call a seeker, there was a place to go. There were people to talk to. There was literature. But even more on this most public of stages, it did make this case for those who were interested in a kind of progressive story of religion, that one might need to look outside of Christianity. And so the appeal, I think, for religious liberals across the 20th century, for sort of looking east, is the story that Vivekananda and Dharmapala told best.

ED: And in doing so, they countered the message that men such as Barrows had envisioned for the fair.

MATT HEADSTROM: And in a sense, that’s what Vivekananda and Dharmapala were doing is going, OK, you want to tell a story about the progress of civilizations and the coming of a kind of fulfillment of a religious dream? Great, let me tell you that story.

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ED: Matt Headstrom is a religious studies professor at the University of Virginia. He’s the author of The Rise of Liberal Religion Book Culture and American Spirituality in the 20th Century.

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NATHAN: That’s going to do it for us today. But you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org. Or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter at BackStoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

JOANNE: This episode of BackStory was produced by David Stenhouse, Nina Earnest, Emily [? Gedacht, ?] and Ramona Martinez. Jamal Milner is our technical director. Diana Williams is our digital editor. And Joey Thompson is our researcher. Additional help came from Angelie [INAUDIBLE], Sequoia Carrillo, Courtney [? Spania, ?] Erin [? Teling, ?] [INAUDIBLE] Thomas, and Gabriel Hunter Chang. Our theme song was written by Nick Thorburn. Other music in this episode came from [INAUDIBLE], Podington Bear, and [? Jazar. ?]

ED: Special thanks to our wonderful voice actors this week, Sharon Milner, who played Ida B. Wells, William Jones, who played Frederick Douglass, James Scales, as John Henry Barrows, and Abhishek Mishra as Swami Vivekananda. And as always, thanks to the Johns Hopkins studio in Baltimore. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the provost’s office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis foundations.

Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

MALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is Professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is professor of the humanities and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of history and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Backster Adams associate professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Windham for Virginia humanities.