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
View Transcript
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.
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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.