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Unit VI: The White City
From the Encyclopedia Chicago…
World's Columbian Exposition
(May 1, 1893–October 30, 1893.)
Organized to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus's landfall in the
New World, the World's Columbian Exposition became a defining moment in
Chicago's history and the history of the United States as a whole.
When the World's Columbian Exposition opened, only 22 years had passed
since the Chicago Fire of 1871; only 28 years had passed since the end of the
American Civil War. In the interval, the era of Reconstruction had given way to
a Gilded Age characterized by frenetic industrial growth, mass immigration, and
class violence as evidenced by Chicago's 1886 Haymarket Square bombing. With
many Americans wondering if sectional conflict had given way to class conflict,
American political and economic leaders followed the example of their peers in
MAP OF FAIRGROUNDS, 1893
Europe and turned increasingly to the medium of the world's fair to provide the
cultural cement for their badly fragmented societies. The first world's fair, London's Crystal Palace Exhibition of
1851, had been championed by the British government to counter the spread of political radicalism and to tout the
global expansion of the British Empire. The success of London's imperial show inspired Britain's continental rivals to
organize fairs of their own. The United States followed in 1876 with a world's fair in Philadelphia, but this exposition
lost money and left many Americans wondering if the exposition movement would ever take hold in the United
States. Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition cast all doubts aside.
Momentum to celebrate the Columbian quadricentennial began building in the
early 1880s. By the close of the decade, civic leaders in St. Louis, New York City,
and Washington DC joined their counterparts in Chicago and announced that they
were interested in hosting a fair that, in a time of great economic uncertainty, held
the promise of generating commercial profits as well as increasing real-estate
values. Exposition backers also were also motivated by the prospect of securing
greater prestige for themselves and for their cities. By 1890, it was clear that the
U.S. Congress would have to decide where the fair would be held and that the
principal contenders, by virtue of their superior financial resources, would be
Chicago and New York. New York's financial titans, including J. P. Morgan,
Cornelius Vanderbilt, and William Waldorf Astor, pledged $15 million to
COURT OF HONOR, 1893
underwrite the fair if Congress awarded it to New York City. Not to be outdone,
Chicago's leading capitalists and exposition sponsors, including Charles T. Yerkes, Marshall Field, Philip Armour,
Gustavus Swift, and Cyrus McCormick, responded in kind. Furthermore, Chicago's promoters presented evidence of
significant financial support from the city and state as well as over $5 million in stock subscriptions from people from
every walk of life. What finally led Congress to vote in Chicago's favor was banker Lyman Gage's ability to raise
several million additional dollars in a 24-hour period to best New York's final
offer.
Euphoric over their accomplishment, Chicago's powerful exposition backers had
no time to rest. Although Congress pushed back the opening of the exposition to
1893, major battles lay ahead, especially over the selection of a site. Many
downtown commercial interests favored a central location, but struggles over
property rights and traffic congestion forced the exposition corporation, headed
by Harlow N. Higinbotham, and the national exposition commission, headed by
Thomas W. Palmer, to settle for Jackson Park, a marshy bog seven miles south of
the Loop.
To hasten the process of construction and exhibit selection, exposition
authorities vested responsibility in Daniel H. Burnham, the exposition's director
of works, and George R. Davis, director-general. Both drew inspiration from earlier fairs, especially the 1889 Paris
WOODED ISLE, 1893
Universal Exposition with its famed Eiffel Tower. And both sought ways to make the Chicago fair distinctive.
For Burnham, architecture and sculpture would be to the Chicago fair what
engineering had been to the Paris exposition. With the help of his partner, John W.
Root, who died suddenly in 1891, Burnham assembled a stunning array of artistic
and architectural talent to design the fair's main, palatial exhibition buildings on
grounds that landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted envisioned becoming a
public park that would rival Central Park in New York City. Major outdoor
sculptures included works by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Frederick MacMonnies,
and Daniel Chester French. The major buildings and their architects included
Administration, by Richard Morris Hunt; Agriculture, by Charles McKim, William
Mead, and Stanford White; Electricity, by Henry Van Brunt and Frank Howe;
Horticulture, by William L. Jenney and William B. Mundie; Fisheries, by Henry
COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION PLANNERS
Ives Cobb; Machinery Hall, by Robert Peabody and John Stearns; Manufactures
and Liberal Arts, by George B. Post; Mines and Mining, by Solon Beman; and Transportation, by Dankmar Adler and
Louis Sullivan. With the exception of the latter, which boasted Sullivan's long-remembered Golden Door, all these
buildings were decidedly neoclassical, lathered with plaster of Paris, and painted a chalky white, thus bestowing the
moniker of “White City” on the main exposition buildings. The White City's neoclassicism provoked a long-lived
debate among architects. Sullivan, for one, would decry the pernicious effects of the fair on American architecture,
while others praised the “civilizing” and uplifting effect that Burnham's Beaux-Arts plan would have on the public
architecture of squalid American cities.
While Burnham was developing his blueprint for the exposition grounds and buildings,
Davis and his team of directors tackled the equally monumental task of giving form to the
millions of exhibits that would go on display. For assistance with classifying exhibit
material, Davis relied on the advice of America's foremost taxonomist, the Smithsonian
Institution's G. Brown Goode, who conceptualized the fair as a veritable encyclopedia of
civilization.
What exactly did “civilization” mean? Part of the answer came from the monumental
exhibition palaces stuffed to overflowing with technologies of industrial and agricultural
production as well as exhibits of fine art that surrounded the Court of Honor. Another part
of the answer was provided by negative example through exhibits and concessions arranged
EXHIBITS ON THE MIDWAY
PLAISANCE, 1893
along the Midway Plaisance, a mile-long avenue that ran at a right angle to the White City
and blended education with amusement.
The inspiration for the Midway came from the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition, where the
French government and prominent anthropologists turned representations of the French
colonies into living ethnological villages featuring people from Africa and Asia. To lend
anthropological legitimacy to their enterprise, Chicago's exposition directors placed the
Midway under the nominal direction of Harvard's Frederic Ward Putnam, who had already
been chosen to organize an Anthropology Building at the fair. Putnam envisioned the
Midway as a living outdoor museum of “primitive” human beings that would afford visitors
the opportunity to measure the progress of humanity toward the ideal of civilization
presented in the White City. All of the ethnographic villages and most of the other
attractions on the Midway, however, were commercial ventures organized by entrepreneurs
who obtained concessions through the Ways and Means Committee of the World's
FERRIS WHEEL, 1893
Columbian Commission. By opening day, the Midway boasted an African village and a
massive Streets of Cairo concession along with other ethnological shows. But the Midway, in addition to providing a
serious educational component to the fair, had become its amusement center as well. With its wheel designed by
George Ferris revolving high above the fairgrounds, its notorious—at least by Victorian standards—belly dancers, and
its varied cuisine, the Midway's multiple fascinations challenged the White City's unity and dignity. Indeed, the
Midway Plaisance is perhaps best understood as a cultural hothouse that generated many novel mass cultural forms
(Riverview Park and Coney Island, for instance, were direct offshoots of the Midway) that would lend a distinctive
character to American culture as it evolved over the course of the twentieth century.
As tensions between the White City and the Midway Plaisance made clear, the World's Columbian Exposition
reflected broader struggles in American society over the future course of American society and culture. Concerns
about the power of the exposition to shape the future were also apparent in the struggles fought by African
Americans and women over their representation at the fair.
The whiteness of the White City became increasingly offensive to African
Americans as plans for the fair unfolded. In response to the determination of
African Americans to show the world their accomplishments since emancipation,
exposition directors insisted that African American proposals for exhibits be
approved by all-white state committees. Most such requests were rejected out of
hand. In response to requests from African Americans that they receive a role in
planning the fair, exposition authorities appointed a St. Louis school principal to
the position of alternate on the national commission. Enraged by the politics of
exclusion and tokenism, some African Americans, led by Ida B. Wells, urged
African Americans to boycott the fair. Frederick Douglass, who served as Haiti's
representative at the exposition, disagreed and urged African Americans to
HAITIAN BUILDING AT THE WCE, 1893
participate as fully as possible. When exposition managers set aside a special
“colored American” day (white ethnic groups had their own days as well), Douglass seized the occasion to insist that
Americans live up to the Constitution and their promises of social justice for former slaves. But the fair, through its
racist policies, had already helped pave the way for national acceptance of the separate-but-equal doctrine that would
become the law of the land in 1896.
Since the act of Congress that originally awarded Chicago the fair
mandated that a Board of Lady Managers be created as part of the
exposition's governing structure, it was clear that white middle-class
women would have more success than African Americans in securing
measure of representation at the fair. But it was not clear how women
would be represented. Some women argued that exhibits prepared by
women should be displayed in the major exhibition palaces alongside
those organized by men and judged accordingly. Others pressed and won
their case that women should have a separate building for their exhibits.
Bertha Honoré Palmer, president of the Board of Lady Managers, lent her
considerable talents to organizing exhibits for the Woman's Building,
POSTCARD OF WOMAN'S BUILDING, 1893
which was designed by Boston architect Sophia Hayden and located near
the point where the Midway Plaisance joined the main exposition grounds.
The World's Columbian Exposition defined American culture. Its World's Congress
Auxiliary presented lectures and discussions by prominent political activists and
intellectuals about subjects as wide-ranging and pressing as religion and science,
labor, and women's rights. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner gave his famous
paper on the significance of the frontier in American history to a meeting of
historians held in conjunction with the fair. Henry Ford saw an internal
combustion engine at the fair that fired his dreams about the possibility of
designing a horseless carriage. For millions of visitors, the electrical illuminations
of the fair were a source of wonder and excitement about the possibilities of
illuminating America's farms and cities. Whether they saw the fair firsthand or
experienced it through postcards or accounts in newspapers and magazines, most
ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO, C.19041913
Americans regarded the World's Columbian Exposition as a cultural touchstone
and remembered it for the rest of their lives.
Multiple tragedies marked the end of the fair. A smallpox epidemic that originated at the fair in midsummer spread
throughout the city by early autumn. Then, just before the gala closing ceremonies were to be held, Mayor Carter
Harrison was assassinated. Finally, shortly after the fair's close, a fire swept through the fairgrounds, destroying
many of the buildings.
The fair was gone, but not its influence. It lifted the spirits of
over 20 million people who paid to visit the exposition just as
the Panic of 1893 hit. Furthermore, many of the exhibits found
their way into museums around the country, including the
Smithsonian Institution and the Philadelphia Commercial
Museum. Chicago's Field Museum owed its origin to the fair and
opened in 1894 in the former Palace of Fine Arts, a building that
would later be reconstructed to become the Museum of Science
and Industry. And the building that had housed delegates to
world's congresses would become the Art Institute of Chicago.
On another level, the triumph of the World's Columbian
RUINS OF WORLD'S FAIR BUILDING, 1894
Exposition revivified the American world's fair movement and
set a standard against which every subsequent exposition would be measured. Forty years later, the promoters of the
Century of Progress Exposition made clear their indebtedness to the 1893 fair when they triggered the opening of
their exposition with a beam of starlight that left Arcturus the same year that the World's Columbian Exposition had
illuminated Chicago's skies.
Robert W. Rydell
Bibliography
Badger, Reid. The Great American Fair: The World's Columbian Exposition and American Culture. 1979.
Harris, Neil, Wim de Wit, James Gilbert, and Robert Rydell. Grand Illusions: Chicago's World's Fair of 1893. 1993.
Rydell, Robert W. All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at America's International Expositions, 1876–1916. 1984.
History of Chicago / HCH
Faust / Room 311
Name: _____________________________
Unit VI: The White City
From the Encyclopedia Chicago…
Century of Progress Exposition
(May 27, 1933–November 12, 1933; May 26, 1934–October 31, 1934)
Originally intended to commemorate Chicago's past, the Century of Progress Exposition came to symbolize hope for
Chicago's and America's future in the midst of the Great Depression.
MAP OF CHICAGO AND
FAIRGROUNDS, 1934
This was the second world's fair that Chicago had hosted, and by the time it closed, it
had been visited by nearly 40 million fairgoers. As was the case with the 1893 World's
Columbian Exposition, the Century of Progress Exposition was conceived in an
atmosphere of economic, political, and social crisis, shaped this time by the economic
recession that followed America's victory in World War I, the ensuing Red Scare,
Chicago's 1919 Race Riots, and Chicago's notorious gangster violence. These threats to
social order led Chicago's political and cultural authorities to organize the 1921
Pageant of Progress along the Municipal Pier (Navy Pier). The festival's success in
attracting over a million visitors during its two-week run inspired a diverse group of
Chicago's business and civic authorities to propose another world's fair that would
build confidence in the fundamental soundness of the American economy and political
system. A decade later, the fair they initiated assumed national importance during the
Great Depression, the nation's worst crisis since the Civil War.
In the course of trying to win support from the city for their plans for a fair that would ultimately be built on
Northerly Island (a narrow strip of reclaimed land just southeast of the Loop that had been developed as part of the
Burnham Plan), exposition promoters pointed to the resurgent world's fair movement across the Atlantic. In 1922,
the French government sponsored a colonial exposition in Marseilles. The British followed suit in 1924–25 with the
British Empire Exhibition on the outskirts of London. Then Paris hosted the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts
Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes.
Together with a world's fair closer to home, the 1926 Philadelphia SesquiCentennial International Exposition, these expositions sparked Chicago's political
and business leaders to action. In 1927, they selected oil tycoon Rufus C. Dawes to
serve as chairman of the exposition board. He invited his brother, Charles G.
Dawes, a former U.S. senator and vice president of the United States, to serve as
chairman of the exposition's finance committee and selected military engineer and
future president of NBC Lenox R. Lohr to direct the fair's operations. In the wake
of the 1929 stock market crash, the Dawes brothers' wealth and prestige, together
with Lohr's managerial prowess, proved vital for the exposition's success. The
Dawes brothers persuaded a notable array of local business figures, including
Julius Rosenwald, head of Sears, Roebuck & Co., to secure $12 million in gold
NORTHERLY ISLAND AND LAGOON,
1933
notes required to underwrite the initial costs of a fair that would ultimately cost
more than $100 million. With that guarantee in tow, the Dawes brothers prevailed
upon Congress to authorize construction of a U.S. government building and to issue invitations to foreign
governments to participate in the fair.
In addition to lending and securing financial and political support for
the Century of Progress Exposition, Rufus Dawes played a pivotal role in
giving the fair its thematic direction. In 1928, at the suggestion of
several Chicago physicians and scientists, who saw in the fair an
opportunity to cement alliances between the business and scientific
communities and to rebuild public trust in science after the devastation
wreaked by chemical weapons in the First World War, Dawes agreed to
turn the fair into an “exposition of science and industrial development.”
To give form and substance to this idea, Dawes asked the National
Research Council to lend assistance. In exchange for their help in
formulating a philosophy of science for the fair, he agreed to scientists'
STREETCAR DIRECT TO WORLD'S FAIR, 1933
requests for a separate Hall of Science that would give the fair its
unofficial motto: “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms.”
Lohr was asked to bring this vision to fruition. Under his close supervision, the architectural
design of the fair was entrusted to a commission consisting of Edward H. Bennett, Arthur
Brown, Jr., Daniel Burnham, Jr., Hubert Burnham, Harvey Wiley Corbett, Paul Philippe
Cret, John A. Holabird, Raymond Hood, and Ralph T. Walker. Unlike earlier fairs, which
gave architects responsibility for individual buildings, Century of Progress Exposition
authorities, with some exceptions, agreed to give architects responsibilities for buildings in
particular areas of the fair. Bennett, for instance, had responsibility for the area north of the
fair's central lagoon, while Hubert Burnham received charge over an area south of the 23rd
Street entrance. Joining these architects in planning the fair were prominent theater
designer Joseph Urban and exhibit designers (and soon-to-be prominent Chicago architects
in their own right) Louis Skidmore and Nathaniel Owings. Together, architects and
SAN CARLO RISTAURANTE
MENU, 1934
designers developed a modernistic vision for the fair that, with its emphasis on streamlined
surfaces and bright colors, differed markedly from the monochromatic, Beaux-Arts design
of the 1893 fair. What the 1933–34 fair had in common with its predecessor was criticism from a famous architect.
Just as Louis Sullivan condemned the architecture of the 1893 fair, so Frank Lloyd Wright, who had been denied a
role in designing the 1933–34 fair, blasted its architecture as a “sham.”
When the Century of Progress Exposition opened, numerous buildings and
exhibits drove home the message that cooperation between science, business, and
government could pave the way to a better future. With the Hall of Science serving
as the cornerstone, nearly two dozen corporations, contrasted with only nine at the
1893 fair, erected their own pavilions and developed displays that insisted that
Americans needed to spend money and modernize everything from their houses to
their cars. Several model homes, including George Keck's House of Tomorrow,
featured synthetic building materials and forecast a future where dishwashers and
air conditioning would be commonplace household items.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt was so taken with the power of the fair to
stimulate spending on consumer durable goods, and thereby complement the
federal government's efforts to jump-start the economy, that he urged Dawes to
reopen the fair in 1934, which the exposition corporation agreed to do. Roosevelt was not alone in his enthusiasm.
Henry Ford, who had insisted that his company not participate in the 1933 fair, switched gears after seeing the
publicity that rival General Motors had generated for its products through its working model of a G.M. assembly line.
By all accounts, the Ford Building, with its gigantic globe highlighting Ford's operations around the world, was the
most popular corporate attraction at the 1934 fair.
TRAVEL AND TRANSPORT BUILDING,
1932
The drive to promote consumer spending was also apparent in the multitude of
entertainments offered by the fair. In addition to its Skyride, with rocket cars
carrying visitors 219 feet above the fairgrounds, the exposition boasted an
Enchanted Isle for children, an Odditorium with variations on old-time “freak
shows,” and various ethnic and ethnological villages. The hit of the Midway, and in
many respects of the fair itself, proved to be a striptease show featuring Sally
Rand's fan dance in the Streets of Paris concession. Rand, a local dancer and
aspiring movie actress, had a talent for selfpromotion and parody. She originally
intended her show as a spoof on Chicago's high-society matrons who insisted on
overdressing at a time when many Americans barely had money to clothe
themselves. By taking it off, she was putting them on. In the process, she made the
Streets of Paris one of the most profitable concessions at the fair.
CENTURY OF PROGRESS TOUR BUS,
1933
The fair suggested that America, despite the Depression, was well on the way toward becoming a consumer paradise.
Whether it would be paradise predicated on mutual respect and equal opportunity was an open question. With the
exception of Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, the African American who established Chicago's roots and whose cabin
was reproduced at the fair, very few exhibits noted African American contributions to Chicago's development. To the
contrary, several concessions, notably the Darkest Africa show, openly ridiculed African Americans. Furthermore,
despite early promises from exposition directors, African Americans were discriminated against in exposition
employment practices and were refused service in several restaurants on the fairgrounds. Some African Americans
boycotted the fair; others, aware that the fair was attempting to chart a roadmap to the future, determined to use the
exposition to change the direction America was heading. With the help of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People, a handful of African American state legislators held up legislation authorizing a
continuation of the fair into 1934 until exposition management agreed to wording in the legislation that forbade
racial discrimination on the fairgrounds. No small accomplishment in an era when segregation was commonplace
and racism its ideological underpinning, the NAACP's success in transforming the Century of Progress Exposition
into a laboratory for advancing the cause of civil rights helped energize a new generation of Chicago's civil rights
activists.
Unlike African Americans, who had some success in shaping practices at the Century of Progress Exposition, women
were largely ignored by the fair's corporate leadership. In 1893, federal legislation had mandated the inclusion of
women's exhibits in the World's Columbian Exposition. In 1933, no such congressional mandate existed, and the
result was that women found little representation in the Century of Progress Exposition apart from midway shows
where they were represented as commodities. In 1933–34, there was no Woman's Building, and exhibits depicting
the contributions of women to America's national progress were few and far between. If the fair was any indication,
progress in the area of women's rights would not automatically follow from the growing power of corporations in
American life.
The Century of Progress Exposition was not without its flaws and critics. But critics found little sympathy among
those who, in the midst of the Great Depression, found employment, entertainment, and education at the fair.
Perhaps the best measure of its success lay in expositions that followed in its wake. By the close of the decade, civic
authorities in Dallas, San Diego, Cleveland, San Francisco, and New York had held major fairs that helped shore up
national faith in the “world of tomorrow”—the theme of the 1939 New York World's Fair. While the Century of
Progress Exposition left no permanent buildings, its profits enriched several Chicago museums, including the
Museum of Science and Industry, which also received some of the exposition's exhibition materials for its permanent
collections. Exposition land was later occupied by Meigs Field and McCormick Place. Perhaps the exposition's most
lasting bequest was to remind Chicagoans and Americans alike of the distance they had traveled and of the distance
they had yet to journey in defining the meaning of progress.
Robert W. Rydell
BBibliography
FFindling, John E. Chicago's Great World's Fair. 1994.
RRydell, Robert W. World of Fairs: The Century of Progress Expositions. 1993.
World History / HCH
Faust / Room 311
Name: ____________________________
Two Fairs – Two Stars
After reading and annotating the accounts of the both the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 and the
Century of Progress Exposition of 1933 and 1934, make a list and explain six ways the fairs were alike and
three ways the fairs were different. Try to focus on big ideas such as what motivated the fairs, who supported
the fairs, the themes of the fairs and the messages sent. If you simply list facts you will not earn full credit.
Similarity #1:
Explanation:
Similarity #2
Explanation:
Similarity #3
Explanation:
Similarity #4
Explanation:
Similarity #5
Explanation:
Similarity #6
Explanation:
Difference #1
Explanation:
Difference #2
Explanation:
Difference #3
Explanation: