Chicago History | Fall 1983

Poster by William P. WeM1 adverli.si.ng "A Nigh/ in Paris" bistro al Clucago'.s 1933-34 A Centwy of Progre.1s F.xposllion. From the exhibition, "A Century of Progress." at the Society through Decembn 31, 1983.

CHICAGO H1s1DRY The Magazine of the Chicago Historical Society Chicago Historical Society OFFICERS Stewart S. Dixon, President Gardner H. Stern , Treasurer Philip W. Hummer, 1st Vice-President Bryan S. Reid , Jr., Secretary Philip D. Block Ill , 2nd Vice-President Emmett Dedmon , Assistant Secretary-Treasurer Theodore Tieken, Immediate Past President

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FROM

THE

EDITOR

History, Cities, and Fairs have an historical background. Our readiness to understand it is one measure of our readiness to see our own world more clearly. In this we rely chiefly on historians' perceptions of the past. Their approaches vary, but two especially will become familiar in Chicago History and are represented in this issue, which is devoted to a single theme: world's fairs. The first approach attempts to understand an event by examining it with closeness and precision from the inside out. Things are commonly more complicated than they appear. Frank and Marguerite Cassell's article shows just how complicated was the political history of the World's Columbian Exposition-and perhaps how familiar. The second approach seeks, often through comparison, the broader significance of local events. Things are sometimes less unique than they appear. Russell Lewis's article on department stores and world's fairs in Paris and Chicago illustrates this search for connections.

Since the first truly international exposition was held in London in 1851, world's fairs have become regular events of abiding popularity and ever-debated significance. Regularly every two or three years, some city (and sometimes more than one at a time) preens itself as the place where the world will gather and where the world 's goods, services, and knowledge will be celebrated. Though uniform in this respect, world's fairs commonly embrace any number of distinct elements each commanding different audiences with special expectations. World's fairs are partly trade fairs, cultural department stores, and entertainment extravaganzas. They are forums at once for shows of international understanding and for barely disguised displays of national and ideological rivalry. They are coveted plums for cities ever anxious to affirm their own self-esteem and enhance their reputation afar. Although international in scope, they are also urban events that tell us much about the cities that produce them. On many of them contemporaries and historians have bestowed larger cultural meanings, seeing them as symbols for an age , whether past, present, future, or perhaps all three. To all of them the mighty and the ordinary have come by the millions to stare in amazement, to have fun, or just to say they were there.

Like those in London, Paris, and other great cities, Chicago's first two world's fairsthe World's Columbian Exposition in 1893 (The White City) and A Century of Progress in 1933-mirrored things that already existed and foretold things that were to come. With this, Chicago's next fair, which will come a century after its first, will have much in common. Nothing else is certain. The process of doing the fair and the shape it takes may at some points bear sharp resemblance to earlier experience. In many other ways the new fair will demonstrate just how different is the urban world of the late twentieth century from that of the late nineteenth. How Chicagoans and others go about putting on another world's fair and the shape they give it are matters that will be determined by private interest and public policy and belong to the near future. How it was done at other times, what it meant then, and what it was like to be there are the subject of what follows.

EVENTS TODAY

TCJ

Cover: "Portal of the Manufaclures and Liberal Arts Building, World'.s Columbian Exposition of 1893 ," by Edwin Howland Blashfield (1848-1936). Gift of Western Reserve Academy.

Fall 1983

Volume XII, Number 3

CHICAGO HISTORY The Magazine of the Chicago Historical Society EDITOR

CONTENTS

TIMOTHY C. JACOBSON

ROBERTA CASEY

The White City in Peril: Leadership and the World's Columbian Exposition

ASSISTANT EDITOR

FRANK

ASSISTANT EDITOR

RUSSELL LEWIS

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DESIGNER KAREN KOHN DESIGN ASSISTANT LISA GINZEL

PAUL W. PETRAITIS

48

E.

CASSELL

Everything Under One Roof: World's Fairs and Department Stores in Paris and Chicago Fashion and the Fair JEANNE MADELINE WEIMANN

DEPARTMENTS 4

Copyright 1983 by the Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60614

CASSELL AND MARGUERITE

RUSSELL LEWIS

PHOTOGRAPHY WALTER W. KRUTZ

A.

Commentary/Ritual Fairs

Utopian Fairs

57

Book Reviews

60

At the Society/Maxwell Street

68

Yesterday's City/ A Century of Progress

ISSN 0272-8540 Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life ILLUSTRATIONS

Cover, CHS; inside front cover, CHS, ICHi-06173; 5, from the MGM release Meet Me in St. Louis,© 1944 Loew's Incorporated , renewed 1971 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc.; 10-11,C HS, ICHi-02520; 13, CHS, ICHi-17641, from World s Columbian Exposition Illustrated (1894); 14 top, CHS, lCHi-17568; 14 center, CHS, ICHi-17569; 14 bottom, CHS, ICHi-16829; 16, CHS, ICHi-17584, from World's Fairs from London 1851 to Chicago 1893 (1892); 17, CHS, ICHi-17585 , from World's Fairs from London 1851 to Chicago 1893 (1892); 21, CHS, ICHi-17567 ; 23, CHS, ICHi-17518; 26-27, CHS, ICHi-17537; 28-29, CHS, ICHi17594 , from The Illustrated London News, May 11, 1867; 30, CHS, ICHi-17645, from The Illustrated London News, October 13, 1869; 31, CHS, ICHi-17643, from The l/lustrated London News, January 9, 1869; 32, CHS, ICHi-17505 ; 33, CHS, lCHi-17592; 34, CHS, ICHi-17583, from Paris Exposition Reproduced (1900); 37, courtesy Marshall Field & Company; 38, CHS, ICHi-13851; 40 top, CHS, ICHi-02554; 40 bottom, CHS, ICHi-02232; 42 top, CHS, ICHi-17532; 42 bottom, CHS, lCHi-17517; 45 top, courtesy the Library of Congress; 45 bottom, CHS, ICHi-17533 ; 48, CHS, ICHi-17605 (detail), from Harper's Bazar. February 13, 1886; 49, CHS, ICHi-17599 , from Review of Reviews (April 1893); 50 top lefl, from Body and Soul (1968), courtesy of Gyldendal, Copenhagen, Denmark; 50 top right, from The Arena (February 1894) ; 61, CHS, Charles R. Clark Collection: 63, CHS, ICHi-04285; 64 and 65, courtesy of Nathan Lerner and the Edwynn Houk Gallery; 66 top and bottom, gift of James Newberry; 71, CHS, ICHi-17671, from Chicago and Its Two Fairs (1933); inside back cover, CHS, ICHi-17446.

COMMENTARY Chicago History invites historians to reflect on the nature of cities and history.

International expositions, the subject of this issue, are urban events that suggest many meanings. Warren Susman sees them as rites of passage in American society; Howard Segal sees them as a chapter in the history of utopianism.

RITUAL FAIRSIW ARREN SUSMAN

often demonstrate special visions of the past, but historians rarely accept these as historical interpretations worthy of serious consideration. Few, if any, students of world's fairs, for example, would list Vincente Minnelli's 1944 film M eet M e in St. Louis in a bibliography of basic works on even St. Louis's Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904. Yet I would like to propose that this classic musical film does have something important to teach us , and to suggest a few of the ways in which we might develop those insights.

I suspect that many people recall the Smith family that lived in an American Gothic house at 5135 Kensington Avenue in St. Louis the year the exposition was being built, and perhaps they also will recall that the film ends with the entire family attending the opening of the fair. The film itself seems almost plotless; the major development-the effect of the transfer of Father to New York on every member of the household-is slight enough, especially when in the end he decides to remain in St. Louis.

For 113 minutes the film dwells lovingly on all the "domestic trivia that surrounds the day-today activities of the family." The action is divided carefully between the four seasons, each introduced by a lovely filigree illustration suggesting a greeting card of the period. Such division allows not only for nostalgic detail, but also careful examination of a series of important rituals, important festival occasions. Against the background of such rituals, POPULAR MOTION PI CTURES

Warren Susman is professor of history at Rutgers University. Howard Segal teaches the history of technology at Eastern Michigan University.

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we witness the various rites of passage of individual members of the family. Thus the film is about rituals and rites of passage as experienced by the well-to-do Smith family, who represent a sentimental American ideal. In that context the final resolution of the filmthe trip to the fair itself-becomes a final ritual (as important a ritual as Halloween and Christmas and Sunday dinner) and rite of passage (as significant as Tootie's, the youngest child, emergence into adolescence or Esther's first love or the other sister's engagement) .

Roughly 13 million people attended the St. Louis exposition and 40 million Chicago's A Century of Progress . Yet virtually every account we have of world 's fairs makes only limited efforts to discuss the experiences of them as part of the everyday life of millions over the years. World's fairs have always been occasions of what came to be called tourism.

Fairs present a significant aspect of that phenomenon so characteristic of the culture in the last 150 years. The meaning of tourism in relationship to the fairs needs further exploration.

In addition , world 's fairs were " media events. " Indeed , they may have been among the first such events to deserve that most modern name. Even those who did not attend them in person came to experience them secondhand through coverage in newspapers and magazines and eventually in radio , newsreels , and other media. Photographs of fairs (it is important to recall that the photograph and international expositions developed in a sense simultaneously) brought the nature and possibly the significance of these events home to a vast audience. The fact that they were "news" represents an important chapter in the story of fairs.

But the impact of that story remained with

Song and dance at 5135 Kensington Avenue:judy Garland and Margaret O'Brien in MGM's 1944 musical Meet Me in St. Louis. In the end all the Smiths went to the f air. Courtesy MGM/VA.

millions long after an exposition ceased to be news. The idea of souvenirs is modern, but there is reason to believe that the idea of particular souvenir items commemorating an event or place takes on special significance in the history of visitors to the fairs. Not only did fairs easily adapt themselves to the postcarda nineteenth- century invention that developed along with tourism - but also to the production of more remarkable souvenir items: a spoon from Chicago in 1893, or a pillow from St. Louis in 1904. American homes were flooded with such items that recalled for years the event and its personal meanings and increased the museum - like functions of American parlors and later living rooms. Such items- as well as the countless photographs taken by fair visitors (by 1939 the organizers of New York's World of Tomorrow would indicate on the fairground s especially good vantage points for picture taking)-not only kept alive th e mem o r y of a fair for those who attend ed , but they also brought the life of that event to millions who did not.

No matter how new and different world 's

fairs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been , we all know that the fair is an ancient institution. At its high point in the Middle Ages, the frequent seasonal fairs all over Europe provided a series of temporary towns invested with both governmental and ecclesiastical privileges as well as early capitalist commercial functions. Otto von Simpson suggests a link between the fairs of this period and architectural achievement. In his classic account of the Gothic cathedral, von Simpson maintains that "the age of the towering pilgrimage churches was ... the age of the great fairs." These medieval fairs served as stations for the great pilgrimages of the period. I propose that in our era pilgrimage becomes tourism , that souvenirs are a more modern form of relic, and that the iconographic function of some fairs' buildings can be related to the iconographic significance of Gothic cathedrals.

These speculations bring me back to the ideas of rites of passage and ritual. Medieval fairs became a sort of temporary town that represented for the visitor a special kind of festival. As productsoftheirtimes, but with 5

Commentary obvious ties to the past, almost all world's fairs also suggested possibilities of the future. They were frequently idealized towns, utopias, or as H. Bruce Franklin shrewdly suggests about New York's 1939 fair, works of science fiction.

By acquainting visitors with many of the most significant aspects of everyday life in the present and the future, often at a time when even museums were less interested in such materials, fairs provided a special experience, a special education. Turning to Victor Turner's analysis of pilgrimage in his book Drama, Fields & Metaphors, I suggest a possible parallel here: could not the modern fair represent that liminal stage that Turner assigns to pilgrimage? Doesn't the visit to the fair mean for those who attend a separation from the world as they lived it, an opportunity to regroup and rethink the world from a vantage point somewhere between past, present, and future-a vantage point that leads to an acceptance and participation in a new social order that is emerging technologically, socially, culturally, politically? Aren't the fairs an agency for creating that transformation or making it ideologically acceptable?

There is also a sense in which the fairs can be said to have religious significance and its icons religious importance (to say nothing of its souvenirs). If I understand sociologist Emile Durkheim correctly, all religion can be ultimately defined as the worship of society: the real object of any faith, according to Durkheim the thing that men and women finally worship, is their own society. While this may not be a fully satisfactory proposition, it might help explain part of the attraction- the religious attraction if you will-of these fairs. People went to worship or at least stayed to worship a vision of that society or a social order. And it was a society and culture quite different from the social order that dominated the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

From the outset the fairs seemed to challenge the basic principles of the older Protestantpuritan, producer-industrial republican order. Even when they struggled to enshrine some of those principles or commemorate them (Philadelphia's Centennial Exposition in 1876 celebrated the birth of the Republic, and New York's 1939 world's fair was nominally 6

dedicated to both George Washington and "Tomorrow"), American fairs especially revealed important contradictions. What was to emerge from 1851 to at least 1939 was the world's fair as a symbol of a new social vision and a new ideology, a key institution of a new culture based not like the older republican culture on principles of scarcity, limitation, and sacrifice, but on new principles of abundance, self-fulfillment, and unlimited possibilities.

Interestingly enough, we can begin to see the transformation I am suggesting in one of the key fair documents we have: Rev. Henry W. Bellows's important sermon of 1853, "The Moral Significance of the Crystal Palace." Bellows, a distinguished Unitarian minister and leader in New York, urged his congregation to attend the fair held that year in New York in imitation of the great Crystal Palace of 1851 in London. But his argument is a significant step in the transformation of which I write.

For Bellows, the exhibition presented at "one view all the various claims of God's bounty-the benignity of his providence, the variety of his endowments distributed among his creatures, the conspiring benevolence of the general plan." If not a new idea, Bellows's constant dwelling on the importance of abundance becomes striking in this context. For his message is that it is good - fundamentally moral-to enjoy that abundance to the fullest.

Bellows constantly is excited about anything that enables us "to enrich the general stock of comforts and luxuries, the ideas and tastes, of civilized nations." Luxury, so long feared (at least ideologically) by republicans and puritans, becomes in Bellows's vision a religious phenomenon, a thing that can lead to moral development of the highest order. Perhaps the first writer to see the fair as an advertisement (all fairs were to be great advertisements and it is characteristic of the culture of abundance that many things and institutions are in fact turned into advertisements), Bellows welcomes that fact. Admitting that Christians of an earlier era would look "upon the 1853 New York fair's complicated costly and luxurious apparatus for promoting physical and economic ease and pleasure of the Christian world" and would see the Crystal Palace with "tears of indignation and disgust,"objecting to

Commentary every means "for removing everything painful, self-denying, or laborious in the human lot;' Bellows argues the opposite:

UTOPIAN FAIRS/HOWARD SEGAL

The increase of comfort, beauty, convenience and grace in the homes of Christendom, so far from being unfavorable to the prospects of morality, and even spiritually, is directly productive of the order, self-respect, dignity and decency which are the first conditions of moral sensibility and spiritual life.

popular stereotypes, world's fairs are more than harmless diversions from everyday life, more than idyllic escapes from individual or collective problems. They are significant social and cultural artifacts which reveal much about the times and the places which produced them, but not necessarily about future times and places. Fairs must therefore be approached seriously and rooted within the mainstream of their respective times and places and not relegated to the periphery as exotic, hence unimportant and uninfluential, phenomena.

The United States has always been receptive to world's fairs. The first such international extravaganza was London's 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition, and New York was next in line just two years later with a smaller-scale version of that initial fair. Dozens of major fairs followed throughout the world, among them several taking place in various American cities - not the least in Chicago in 1893. In this as in so many other things, America eventually surpassed the mother country.

World's fairs have been popular in the United States and elsewhere for commercial reasons; they are good public relations for their sponsors, and it would be misleading to ignore this dimension of fairs' history. The most recent world's fair, last year's Energy Expo in Knoxville, is a perfect example of this thrust. Indeed, the local, regional, and national exhibitions out of which world's fairs grew were the predominantly commercial European trade fairs. They persist today and have no real social or cultural goals.

Yet American fairs, unlike their European counterparts, are key components of a distinctive utopian tradition dating back to the founding of the United States as a supposedly unique country with unprecedented potential. More specifically, these fairs are part of an American tradition that was embodied in antebellum communities like New Harmony and the Shaker villages, and which was elaborated in the visionary writings of Edward Bellamy (Looking Backward, 1888) and others later in the nineteenth century. American world's

Bellows's sermon, which was preached to other congregations and published as a pamphlet, is suggestive of a new sensibility or ideology that I believe came to be associated with all later fairs. It is the ideological consequence of the liminality of attending fairs.

Nothing in these suggestions is meant to deny the importance of other functions that others have seen in fairs. It would be absurd not to see, for example, the importance of bureaucratic and corporate structures in shaping the very institution of the modern fair or to see what a serious business they were.

Fair managers were, after all, major managers in a corporate America: Lenox Lohr, an army engineer and associate of the Dawes brothers, was to head a radio network and a major museum of science and industry after his tenure at Chicago's A Century of Progress. Grover Whalen, New York's 1939 fair manager, was pictured as a public relations glad-hander only, yet he sat on several important corporate boards, organized one of the most important WPA parades in New York, and served as police commissioner of New York. These interconnections are fundamental.

But of the many things the fairs were, they must also be regarded as festivals in the sense that I have used that idea here. Fairs might well be added to the roster of American ritual celebrations. They were special ritual occasions that came regularly. Every generation, one suspects, has had its fair which not only made countless Americans more aware of the importance of everyday life (a very modern idea itself), but became a significant part of that life . Most important, world's fairs were rites of passage for American society which made possible the full acceptance of a new way of life, new values, and a new social organization. Let us not think about world's fairs in the future without including Meet Me in St. Louis.

CONTRARY TO

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Commentary fairs were another expression of this utopianism to offer mechanisms for solving problems confronting American society. While all three expressions of American utopianism have coexisted in most periods since the Civil War, the failure by the late nineteenth century of utopian communities and utopian writings to redeem all of American society and not merely a handful of disenchanted Americans enabled world's fairs to become the primary expression of American utopian hopes.

The 1893 White City in Chicago anticipated this transition away from utopian writings even though it arose in their heyday. It represented the beginning of a shift from literary blueprints of utopias to architectural and engineering ones; from the vision of a distant future utopia of a century or more hence, to the realization of utopia in the near future only a few decades away; from small communities and pastoral suburbs to large cities and closely connected suburbs; and from a variety of panaceas for America's problems to just one: technology.

All world's fairs have embraced technology, usually in the context of promoting particular tools and machines, but with minimal concern for their broader social and cultural significance. Visitors marveled at Colt revolvers, McCormick reapers, Singer sewing machines, Corliss engines, Westinghouse electric generators, and the like, but rarely were they given a blueprint for the kind of society those advances were supposedly helping to create. The 1893 fair was a notable exception . In design, the Chicago fair presented a model of a wellplanned city, even though its neoclassical patterns, gigantic dimensions, and playful demeanor soon rendered its achievements obsolete rather than prophetic. More influential on urban design was the more modest and more practical design of the 1900-02 McMillan Commission for Washington, D.C., which, in updating and preserving L'Enfant's original plan for the city, became a model for future city planning. But even if the White City did not influence city and national planning to the extent traditionally assumed, it did treat, at least implicitly, technology in its proper role as a major factor in the further progress of society and not just as hardware.

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The fairs of the 1930s-A Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago, the CaliforniaPacific Exposition in San Diego, the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, and especially the Building a World of Tomorrow in New York in 1939 and 1940-most fully articulated, promoted, and accepted technology as the panacea for America's problems.

Despite understandable disillusionment with modern technology in the aftermath of World War I , the 1930s saw a genuine faith in the peaceful uses of technology as the sure path to utopia.

The New York World's Fair of 1939 was at once the natural outgrowth of this extended enthusiasm for technology and its end point.

Walter Dorwin Teague , Henry Dreyfuss, Raymond Loewy, and , most notably, Norman Bel Geddes, the four major architects of the World of Tomorrow , themselves were pioneering industrial designers who readily assumed that the achievement of a technological utopia of some kind literally awaited their design. Having begun their careers designing home appliances, vehicles, buildings, and the other components of a new world, in the Building a World of Tomorrow exposition they broadened this vision to include more than hardware. And they even set 1960 as the date for the fullfilment of their vision , thus moving up the deadline for utopia to only two decades ahead.

The gap between the fantasy World of Tomorrow and the real one that emerged after World War II proved far wider than the fair designers or their government and corporate sponsors could have anticipated. In general, the America of 1960 envisioned by Bel Geddes and the other designers had not yet come about even in 1983 and seems quite unlikely to come about by the year 2000. Ironically, the physical appearance of the World of Tomorrow has been achieved at least in outline: today's sleek skyscrapers and smooth superhighways are quite reminiscent of the General Motors Futurama exhibit that Bel Geddes created. But the social and cultural dimensions of the utopia that he and his colleagues assumed would be inevitable byproducts of technological progress - qualitatively greater happiness, more meaningful

Commentary leisure time, and fewer wars-have not been realized. Indeed, the optimism of the New York World's Fair's 1939 season was shattered by the beginning of World War II, a technological nightmare. No later world's fair anywhere would be as avowedly idealistic regarding "the shape of things to come" as were the Depression-era American fairs.

Not suprisingly, more recent fairs have made fewer social and cultural predictions.

Still, as Knoxville's Energy Expo testified, technology continues to mold world's fairs even as technology in the "real world" is increasingly questioned as a panacea. Indeed, the latest technological revolution, the developments in electronics and information processing now penetrating our offices and factories as well as our homes, might ironically render all future world's fairs obsolete. Why travel to distant points if satellites, computers, word processors, and future electronic innovations can deliver the needed information; why come if one can see the latest technological advances on a television screen rather than in person?

Today other expressions of utopianism are now replacing world's fairs just as they replaced earlier utopian writings and communities. Buckminister Fuller's geodesic domes (used for several fairs) and tetrahedral cities and Gerard O'Neill's space colonies readily come to mind. They are clearly realizable structures and not imagined blueprints; they can surely come about sooner than the World of Tomorrow; and they harbor ample social and cultural aspirations. Their popularity reflects that ever persistent American faith in technology as the solution to all problems.

Still, I would not yet compose an obituary for world's fairs. Just as there have been periodic revivals of utopian communities, most recently in the 1960s, and of utopian writings, as in the work of Ursula Le Guin , so fairs might revive as well-revive, that is, as important social and cultural events unlike the Energy Expo and, I fear, the several other world's fairs now planned through the year 2000. People may find it necessary after all, for example, still to view technological developments in the flesh and not just on television or computer

screens. And ongoing developments in robotics and genetic engineering might provide further reasons for world 's fairs . For their part, world 's fairs might relegate their traditional entertainment functions to video arcades and "theme" amusement parks. They might be smaller, more decentralized , and even mobile, perhaps traveling from one site to another. And they might look for sponsorship from multi-national corporations rather than states and nations.

Whatever their form , the next world 's fairs are no likelier than their predecessors to be able to predict the future. Ironically, the naive assumption that one can do so persists. No one realized this more than Henry Adams, the great American historian and man of letters, and it is fitting to conclude with his reflections on the historical discontinuities inspired by his visit to the Paris exposition of 1900. At a time when so many other Americans predicted ever greater technological, and in turn social progress, Adams expressed doubts about the future.

Until the Great Exposition of 1900 closed its doors in November, Adams haunted it, aching to absorb knowledge, and helpless to find it. He would have liked to know how much of it could be grasped by the best informed man in the world .... Historians undertake to arrange sequence,-called stories , or histories-assuming in silence a relation of cause and effect. These assumptions , hidden in the depths of dusty libraries, have been astounding, but commonly unconscious and childlike; so much so, that if any captious critic were to drag them to light, historians would probably reply, with one voice, that they had never supposed themselves required to know what they were talking about. Adams, for one , had toiled in vain to find out what he meant. ...

Where he saw sequence, other men saw something quite different, and no one saw the same unit of measure ... .Satisfied that the sequence of men led to nothing and that the sequence of their society could lead no further, while the mere sequence of time was artificial, and the sequence of thought was chaos , he turned at last to the sequence of force; and thus it happened , that after ten years' pursuit, he found himselflying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by the sudden eruption of forces totally new. [The Education of Henry Adams, 1907]

Would that future world's fairs have a similarly profound impact on at least a few of their visitors.

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The White City in Peril: Leadership and the World's Columbian Exposition

By Frank A. Cassell and Marguerite E. Cassell

View of the Main Basin and MacMonnies' Grand Columbian Fountain at the World'.s Columbian Exposition. Photograph by C. D. Arnold.

The 1893 fair was an unfmgettable event. But before the gates ever opened, the local and national interests promoting it confronted obstacles that came close to preventing it.

at the beauty, size, harmony, and general impressiveness of Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition of 1893.

The vast white structures of neoclassical design set amid gardens, lawns, and lagoons represented a great triumph for America's architects, artists, sculptors, and landscape specialists. The 28 million visitors who traveled to Jackson Park that long-ago summer saw more than 160,000 exhibits that summarized the material, educational, and aesthetic achievements of western civilization.

They carried away memories of the great Ferris Wheel, the electric intramural railroad, the world's great art, Frederick MacMonnies' fountain, and Daniel Chester French's gilded statue Republic. Years later they would still talk about seeing the world's largest building, sailing through lagoons on an authentic Venetian gondola, enjoying the spectacle of fireworks displays over the Grand Basin, and visiting the Streets of Cairo display on the Midway to study Little Egypt's seductive dance.

By almost any measure the world's fair of 1893 was a success. Although some grumbled about the historically derivative architectural style, the fair generally earned praise from both American and foreign visitors. Even after the gates had closed and most of the white palaces had burned down, the exposition influenced people. For example, it inspired the City Beautiful movement in America. At Jackson Park urban dwellers saw that cities could be clean, spacious, and aesthetically pleasing; they returned home and sought to remake their own cities in the image of the exposition's Court of Honor. Other Americans, VISITORS MARVELED

Frank A. Cassell is chairman of the history department at the University of Wi.1consin-Milwaukee. Marguerite E. Cassell is an historian of the World's Columbian Exposition.

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White City in Peril businessmen and farmers, profited from new and expanded contacts with foreign market.s.

And virtually everyone who attended the fair learned something about art, technology, and foreign cultures. Even today, ninety years later, the Columbian Exposition has the power to excite people. It is still the model against which other world's fairs are measured.

Both contemporaries and historians have written extensively about the buildings, the exhibits, and the landscaping of the exposition. Much is known about the roles of Daniel Burnham, Frank Millet, John Wellborn Root, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Frederick Law Olmsted, and the other artists, sculptors, and architects who created the White City. But there is another part to the story. Only the sketchiest accounts describe the origins, management, funding, and politics of the exposition . Even less is known about how the cooperation of states, territories, foreign governments, Congress, the Illinois legislature, the Chicago City Council, and other groups vital to the fair's success was obtained.

A study of those aspects of the fair has the effect of relating the Columbian Exposition to the social, political, and economic context of the age. Furthermore, it brings to the forefront of the fair's history a new cast of characters fully as responsible for the exposition's ultimate triumph as those who designed, built, and decorated the buildings and grounds at Jackson Park. Bankers, railroad managers, fair administrators, politicians, businessmen, diplomats, and government officials helped determine the scope of the fair as much as did Daniel Burnham and his colleagues. The leadership these individuals exercised was essential, for on more than one occasion powerful forces threatened the exposition. If they had not resolved the political and financial challenges they confronted between 1890 and 1892, the White City would not have been built.

The Chicago bankers and businessmen supporting the fair could not escape dealing with nat10nal, state, and foreign governments to achieve their goals. While they possessed much of the necessary funding and sufficient managerial talent to host a world's fair, they needed the recognition and support of many different government entities if they were to 12

succeed. For example, only Congress and the President could officially designate Chicago as the site for the fair and invite other nations to participate. Special legislation was needed to invite foreign dignitaries to the fair as guests of the United States and to alter customs regulations to permit duty-free importation of exhibits. Above all , the Chicagoans needed some federal funding to help build the White City. If the fair was to be truly national and international, the Chicagoans required the assistance of state and foreign governments who would have to supply official displays, erect buildings on the grounds, and stimulate merchants and manufacturers to exhibit their goods. Within Chicago itself the fair's organizers found that they were constantly asking the city for assistance in such matters as raising money, determining the site for the fair, and arranging for fire protection and a water supply. They could not, in short, plan and run an international exposition without substantial government cooperation, and that required them to enter a political world where few had much experience.

It was apparent from the beginning that the federal government would be deeply involved in the planning and management of the fair.

In the summer of 1889, Chicago business leaders initiated the effort to have the city host a world's fair to celebrate Columbus's discovery of America. A preliminary organization was formed under the auspices of the mayor and city council of Chicago. Led by men such as Lyman Gage of the First National Bank, Edward Jeffery of the Illinois Central Railroad, and hotel magnate Potter Palmer, the preliminary group organized an ambitious program to win congressional and presidential approval of their application. A subscription drive obtained $5 million in pledges from the city's banks and railroads and from George Pullman, Marshall Field, Charles Yerkes, and other wealthy individuals. The preliminary organization also sent a delegation to Europe to study the international exposition then being held in Paris. An extensive lobbying effort was mounted both in the individual states and in Washington, D.C. Despite the enthusiasm and energy of their initial campaign, the members of the preliminary organization

White City in Peril

H eaded by Colonel George R . Davis (front row, third from right), this executive commillee campaigned in Congress to bring the fair to Chicago. Their efforts were successful despite aggressive lobbying by New York, St. Louis, and Washington , D.C.

soon found themselves mired down in national politics . Three other cities- New York , St. Louis, and Washington-also sought the world 's fair and likewise aggressively advanced their claims before Congress. ew York's vigorous campaign received substantial support from northeastern states.

The Chicago bid might well have failed had not the preliminary organization obtained the services of Cook County Treasurer George M. Davis to head its political operations in Washington. Davis, a former congressman, was one of Chicago's principal Republican leaders.

Under his leadership Chicago's campaign in Washington achieved greater effectiveness. In February 1890, the House of Representatives picked Chicago as the fair's site. This decision was subsequently accepted by the Senate, and o n April 20 President Benjamin Harrison signed the legislation .

A review of the law showed that Davis and the Chicagoans had been forced to accept numerous conditions. For example, they were required to raise an additional $5 million .

Moreover, the heavy lobbying by women 's groups resulted in a provision to create a Board of Lady Managers to supervise women 's contributions to the fair. Most significantly, the law established a national commission with broad powers over the fair. The commission had the right to accept the site for the fair and to approve the plans of the buildings. It had the authority to allot exhibition space, to administer an awards program , to deal with foreign exhibitors at the fair, to determine the scope of the exposition, and to appoint members to the Board of Lady Managers. Until the commission certified that the Chicagoans actually had raised $10 million, provided a suitable site, and submitted acceptable building plans, the President by law could not invite foreign nations to participate. The federal government had declared that it would be a co-manager of the world's fair.

Even before Harrison signed the fair bill, the Chicagoans perfected their own organizational structure. The preliminary organization gave way to a corporation chartered by 13

The three presidents of the World's Columbian Exposition Company were (top to bottom) Harlow Higginbotham, a business associate of Marshall Field's; William T Baker, president of the Chicago Board of Trade; and Lyman Gage, president of the First National Bank. Top: gift of Kenneth Sawyer Goodman Menwrial; center: gift of Dr. C. W. H ennan; bottom: gift of Frederick T Haskell.

14

the state of Illinois, which originally was known as the World's Exposition of 1892 and capitalized at $5 million . Later the name was changed to the World's Columbian Exposition Company and the capital stock increased to $10 million. Shares sold at $10. Nearly 30,000 people, mostly from Chicago, soon purchased shares, but approximately ninety individuals and corporations owned the bulk of the stock and determined who would serve on the board of directors. From the beginning and throughout its existence, the company was entirely run by businessmen. Lyman Gage , president of the First National Bank; William T. Baker, president of the Board ofTrade; and Harlow N. Higginbotham, a business partner of Marshall Field's, were the three presidents of the corporation over the years. Other members of the board of directors represented Chicago 's banks , railroads , manufacturing firms , and newspapers. In selecting officers and directors the company kept politics in mind. Both Republicans and Democrats served in high posts, but the majority of directors were Republicans. George Davis was kept on the board to advise on political matters and Benjamin Butterworth, a relative of Marshall Field's and a Republican congressman from Ohio , was hired as secretary and later as corporate attorney. By the spring of 1890, the exposition company had named committees to solicit exhibits, raise funds , find an appropriate site , and arrange for the design and building of the fair's structures.

In July the national commission met in Chicago and selected its officers. Appointed by the President, the commission had two delegates and two alternates from each state and territory and eight at-large members. The membership was evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans . Unlike the businessmen members of the Illinois corporation 's board of directors, the national world's fair commissioners were active politicians.

Some were former congressmen while others had served or currently served in state legislatures . Most participated in the affairs of their respective political parties. Thomas W. Palmer of Detroit, the president of the national commission , had made a great deal of money from lumbering enterprises in Michigan . He was

While City in Peril better known , however, as a former Republican United States senator who had recently been the American minister to Spain. One commission vice president was a Democratic national committeeman from California; another officer, also a Democrat, had been secretary to the Texas legislature.

Conflict between the national commission and world's fair corporation began early in the history of the fair. The politicall y oriented commissioners, armed with broad if vague authority, felt they represented the people of the United States. As the fair was to be a national and international affair carried on under the authority of the federal government, they considered themselves to have the preliminary role in planning the fair. They claimed that without their cooperation there would be no foreign participation in the exposition and little involvement of states and territories. For their part, the Chicago businessmen serving on the local board of director heartily disliked the commission.

The Chicagoans not only had won a major political struggle to host the fair, but they had committed themselves to raise $10 million to pay for it. They could not ignore the commission , but they were hardly likely to accept a secondary role in planning the fair.

The national commission and the local directors clashed over numerous issues during the summer and fall of 1890. Most important, the two bodies were at odds over the site of the fair in Chicago. The local directors, beginning in June, had attempted to find a site that could accommodate giant structures and huge crowds. On July 1, they proposed that the main part of the fair be located east of Michigan Avenue on the downtown lake front, which they planned to expand by landfill.

Realizing, that even an enlarged lake front site would not be adequate for exposition purposes, the directors also recommended that some of the exhibition building be located seven miles to the south in Jackson Park. The decision to use the lake front was in part influenced by economic interests represented on the board of directors. Men such as hotel owner Potter Palmer and traction magnate Charles T. Yerkes felt that they would profit greatly if the fair was downtown. Other di rec-

tors believed that the financial success of the exposition depended on locating the major portions of the fair near the city's railroad terminals and hotel district. Still others were perturbed over the bitter competition between the north, south, and west sides of Chicago to become the principal site of the fair. Land speculators and other partisans of Jackson Park, Garfield Park, and an area near Graceland Cemetery in the north heavily lobbied the directors. The centrally located lake front appealed to the directors as a suitable compromise that would spare them the problem of choosing among the contending parties.

The downtown lake front location satisfied the most powerful economic and political forces in Chicago. The national commissioners, however, represented quite different interests and strongly opposed the lake frontJackson Park site. Since by law their approval was necessary, their views carried weight. The commission's position was largely shaped by national commissioners from agricultural states. Farmers and stock men disliked the dual site plan fearing that their exhibits would be consigned to distant Jackson Park while the most attractive industrial and cultural exhibits would be concentrated on the lake front. The national commission, therefore, favored a single site for the entire exposition. Since the lake front could not possibly be made large enough for this purpose, the commission proposed instead that Washington Park, a mile west of Jackson Park, be designated as the main site with Jackson Park and the Midway Plaisance as secondary locations.

The opposition of the national commission was by no means the only obstacle to the downtown lake front proposal. To use any of the lake front, the Chicago directors required the permission of the state of Illinois, the city of Chicago, the Illinois Central Railroad Company which had tracks in the area, and Michigan Avenue property owners sensitive about interference with their view of the lake. In addition, to create new land by filling in along the shore lin e , the directors had to obtain authority from the United States War Department, which had jurisdiction over the harbor.

In the end the directors overcame most of these obstacles but never persuaded the 15

White City in Peril

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White City in Peril

After much debate, the local fair directors and the national commissioners agreed on Jackson Park and the Midway Plaisance (above) as the site for the fair. With that question settled, the two bodies then drew up a plan for the site (left).

national commission to change its mind .

Meanwhile, the commission's alternate plan to use Washington Park was stymied by the South Park Commission which was unwilling to see the park's topography changed to meet the exposition's building requirements.

In November 1890, the directors and the national commission finally agreed that the Columbian Exposition would be located mainly in Jackson Park and the Midway Plaisance.

The site question, one of the most troubling in the fair's history, had consumed six months.

While it lasted, no buildings could be designed or built. Without an agreed upon site the President of the United States cou ld not issue his proclamation inviting the nations of the world to participate in the exposition. When President Hai-rision finally issued the proclamation on December 24, only twenty-two months remained before the exposition was scheduled to open in October 1892.

In retrospect it seems clear that the site question put at great risk the whole exposition . Yet the entire episode illustrated the essentially political nature of the exposition.

Neither the Chicago directors nor the national commission wished to harm the fair, but one

group represented local interests and the other national interests. The directors had the money, but the commission had national legislation to support its claims of preeminence in exposition matters. At stake was not only which group of powerful men would predominate but also which would determine the scope and nature of the entire exposition.

It was apparent to some leaders of the two world's fair bodies, even before the site question was resolved, that continued disputes over their respective powers could be fatal to the exposition. Efforts were made to have committees with similar duties from the commission and the board of directors meet jointly to agree upon plans. More important, an agreement was reached as to who would be the exposition's Director General or chief administrative officer. In September 1890, the national commission named a special committee to determine the precise duties of the commission and the local directors. Part of the committee's report advised that the commission appoint a Director General to be responsib le for dealing with exhibitors and mounting the displays in the various exposition buildings . The directors were unhappy with the entire process. They resented the unilateral decla rations of authority by the commission .

Moreover, the Chicagoans felt they and not the commission shou ld name the Director 17

White City in Peril General. At this critical juncture, with th e exposition in danger of collapse over jurisdictional disputes and feelings running high over the site issues, former diplomat Thomas Palmer worked out a compromise. The president of the commission proposed that the national commission appoint as the Director General whomever was nominated by the local directors. In this way the authority of the commission would be sustained while permitting the directors to actually control the most im portant administrative position in the exposition's organizational structure.

Although Palmer 's scheme received approval from the national commission, the directors hesitated. At one heated meeting some members urged that the board ignore the Palmer plan and proceed to appoint a Director General paid by and responsible to the local corporation. Such an action would have widened the breach with the commission and further delayed the work of organizing and building the exposition. Lyman Gage, president of the board, displayed some of the political skill that a few years later would propel him into William McKinley's cabinet as Secretary of the Treasury. He urged caution and restraint. Besides the advantages to the directors of Palmer's plan , Gage argued that there would be no exposition at all if the commission failed to advise the President that Chicago had met the conditions prescribed in the law of April 1890. Gage won over a majority to his point of view. The directors then nominated one of their own members, the politically astute George Davis, to be the Director General. A day later the national commission made the choice official.

Davis now became responsible not only for coordinating the two world's fair bodies, but also for heading the general effort to create an exposition that would be a credit both to Chicago and the nation. Legally, he reported to the national commission. But he remained a member of the local board of directors and served in an ex officio capacity on all of its committees. Davis's authority over exposition matters, although extensive, did not include the actual construction of the buildings at Jackson Park. Daniel Burnham, named Director of Works in the fall of 1890, continued to report 18

to the local corporation and personally controlled construction activities. Still , Davis's appointment brought a measure of administrative unity to an operation that many had felt was on the verge of failure . He soon proposed, and the directors and national commissioners accepted , a plan to organize the fair's administration into fifteen departments with chiefs nominated by and responsible to Davis. He combed the United States to find competent experts to head the departments, and once selected he relied heavily upon them to assemble complete and interesting exhibitions. The story of their activities and their success is an important but still unwritten chapter in the history of the fair.

Davis's appointment and the department system streamlined the exposition 's management system but did not settle completely the continuingjurisdictional controversies between the local board of directors and the commission. Davis, Burnham, and their staffs clashed frequently with various committees of the two bodies, which demanded the power to review and even superintend the work of the professional administrators. Department chiefs were confused as to whom they were accountable, and by November it became clear that further institutional adjustments were needed. Both the commission and the board of directors appointed special committees that met together and eventually negotiated a complex settlement as to the respective duties and responsibilities of the two organizations. The most important aspect of the plan called upon each body to appoint a standing Committee of Reference and Control composed of eight members. When jurisdictional disputes arose, the two committees were to meet jointly to resolve the issues. Their decision on any matter was final and not subject to appeal. The joint Committee of Reference and Control acted as the supreme court of the fair administration. It permitted the directors and the commissioners to live and work together, albeit uneasily. Above all, it freed Davis, Burnham, and the department chiefs from being caught between jealous committees.

Under the general settlement of December 1890, work on the fair progressed more smoothly, although the management appara-

White City in P eril tus remained cumbersome. The commission, the board of directors , the committees of the two bodies, Davis, Burnham , and the department chiefs frequently disputed among themselves about their respective areas of authority.

There was no single authority to guide the complex work of preparing the exposition. By the summer of 1892, thoughtful members of the national commission and the board of directors realized that something more powerful than the Committee of Reference and Control was called for. In August, the commission and the board of directors put aside their mutual hostilities long enough to create the Council of Administration, which consisted of two representatives from each body. Both Davis and Burnham henceforth reported directly to this powerful group. For the first time all exposition operations were united in a single coherent structure. Under the leadership of Harlow Higginbotham, who was also president of the local corporation's board of directors, the council provided the coordination that proved indispensable to the success of the exposition . The businessmen of the board and the politicians of the national commission had finally discovered a way to jointly administer the fair.

Solving the site and administrative problems were basic requirements for making the fair happen. It might still however have been a colossal flop if the fair's managers had failed to attract widespread support both in America and abroad. Without the active participation of foreign, state, and territorial governments, there would have been no exhibits in Burnham's palaces and no crowds to admire Olmsted 's landscape artistry. And in 1890 it was by no means clear that the necessary level of participation could be achieved.

The pr_o blem of interesting foreign nations commanded attention early in the history of the fair. Commissioners and directors alike knew that a number of factors might discourage foreigners from exhibiting their goods. First, Chicago was an inland city and as yet little known to much of the world. Foreigners, it was suggested, might be reluctant to pay high transportation costs to exhibit in a city that might or might not produce a great fair. Secondly, several major manufacturing

nations , including France and Great Britain, deeply resented the new highly protectionist McKinley Tariff, which took effect in 1890.

Some officials in these countries asked why attractive displays of goods should be shipped to America when the duties of nearly fifty per cent made competition in the American market very difficult. There was even some hint that several nations might boycott the exposition in retaliation. There were also problems of publicity. Europeans received most of their news of America from New York sources, and what they read about the Columbian Exposition was rarely positive. The fair's organizers feared that such slanted reports would discourage European businessmen from exhibiting at the exposition.

Although by law the national commission had primary responsibility for dealing with foreign nations and exhibitors, it was the board of directors which took the first steps in organizing a campaign to obtain international participation in the fair. As early as May 9, 1890, the board named Gustavus Gerrard of Illinois as a special representative to visit Japan's National Exposition of Art and Industries and report on the exhibits. But his main task was to advance "the interests of the World's Columbian Exposition." In August the directors hired Roman Hitchcock to represent the exposition in China; two months later Cyrus Adler was sent to Turkey, Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia.

The board of directors' initiatives in promoting foreign participation evoked a heated protest from the national commission and again raised jurisdictional questions. In fact, the directors soon realized that the cooperation of the commission was essential in developing support abroad. Sending out agents to different parts of the world was useful , but these individuals lacked diplomatic standing and spoke only for a local Illinois corporation. A truly effective campaign to win foreign support demanded the full cooperation of the State Department. But the State Department and other federal agencies would only deal with the national commission which they recognized as the official voice of the fair.

On the other hand, the commission lacked funds to finance operations in other countries.

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White City in Peril The situation forced a compromise. Each body had appointed foreign affairs committees, and in the fall of 1890 these committees heldjoint sessions in ew York to coordinate their activities.

An early and important result of the cooperation between the two committees was the establishment of the Latin American Department within the administrative structure of the exposition. The idea for such a department came from William G. Curtis, head of the State Department's Bureau of American Republics . Curtis was speaking for Secretary of State James G. Blaine, who hoped to use the fair to promote his dream of expanding American commercial contacts with the nations of Central and South America. Curtis's plans for a major Latin American exhibit at the fair quickly won the approval of the two foreign affairs committees. They also named Curtis to head the new Latin American Department, thus insuring the closest possible relations with the State Department.

Operating from his Washington office, Curtis soon arranged for ten army and navy officers knowledgeable about Latin America to be loaned to the exposition. After a thorough briefing about the fair, the officers were sent to various Latin American nations as special world's fair envoys charged to encourage govern men ts to participate in the event. The Latin American Department proved a great asset to the fair. Never before had so many of the United States' southern neighbors sent exhibits to a world's fair. Curtis, incidentally, was responsible for two other popular attractions at the fair: the facsimiles of Columbus's caravelles and the reproduction of the Spanish monastery La Rabida.

Efforts accelerated after December 24, 1890, when President Benjamin Harrison finally issued his official proclamation inviting the nations of the world to participate in the great exposition. Harrison's proclamation put the full prestige of the United States government behind the fair and assured the cooperation of all federal government departments.

The State Department ordered American diploma ts to deliver the President's invitation to their host governments and to request that national world's fair commissions be

20

appointed to organize exhibits. Agents of the Treasury Department were dispatched to European capitals to explain to government officials and businessmen that the provisions of the McKinley Tariff would not apply to foreign exhibits shipped to the exposition.

The commission and board of directors remained concerned that the government's efforts still would not overcome foreign prejudices against the fair. Throughout 1891 the two bodies diligently worked to expand contacts with potential exhibitors abroad. The fair's public relations chief, Moses P. Handy. supp lied a steady diet of cheerful stories to the newspapers of the world. Groups of directors and commissioners traveled to all parts of Europe to explain the commercial benefits of large and attractive exhibits of manufactured goods. Additional agents were appointed to represent the fair in England, France, Italy, Germany, and Russia, and by the end of 1891 the exposition managers had further expanded their international operations with branch headquarters in London, Paris, and Mexico City. But among all the efforts made in this period none was more significant than Bertha Palmer's highly publicized trip to Europe in the summer of 1891. Meeting with royalty and other high government officials, the graceful president of the Board of Lady Managers secured support both for women's exhibits and for the exposition.

In the fall of 1891 the exposition's extensive diplomatic operations were reorganized and placed under the control of Director General Davis. He proposed to the commission and the board of directors that a Department of Foreign Relations be created to coordinate and promote the fair's interests abroad. They concurred, and Walter Fearns, an experienced diplomat, was appointed to head the new operation. All of the world's fair agents, including Curtis and his army and navy officers, now reported to Fearns. The Department of Foreign Relations soon expanded the fair's representation abroad and succeeded in making greater use of American diplomats already on the scene. The work paid off. When the Columbian Exposition opened on May 1, 1893, more than one hundred nations and colonies were represented in the huge exhibit halls.

White City in Peril

Publicity campaigns launched by the /air's public relations chief.

Moses P. Handy, were instrumental in gaining national and foreign support f or the fair. Gift of K enneth Sawyer Goodman M emorial.

Seventeen nations appropriated funds to erect national buildings in Jackson Park. No other world's fair of the nineteenth century matched the international character of the great show in Chicago.

Involving the states of the Union and the territories demanded quite as much attention from the fair's managers. It was assumed that a majority of the exhibits and most of the visitors to the fair would be from the United States, which meant that failure to excite the American people about the exposition would mean financial disaster. Moses P. Handy's publicity campaign helped shape favorable public attitudes, but the key to state and terr i to r i a 1_in v o I v e m e n t w a s to g a i n o ffi c i a 1 recognition of the fair and appropriations from the state legislatures . This meant that lobbying operations had to be mounted in every state and territory. Resistance was considerable and commonly tied to national political issues. New York, the most populous and richest state, still resented losing the fair to Chicago and reacted coolly. In 1890, the southern states had fought a major political battle in Congress to prevent passage of the Lodge

Force Bill, a measure designed to protect the rights of beleaguered black voters in the South . Several southern states threatened to hold the fair hostage until Lodge's proposed legislation was defeated. In Nevada and Arizona, legislators considered resolutions to boycott the fair unless Congress approved a measure allowing for the free coinage of silver, a law much desired by silver mining interests.

In each case fair officials complained loudly that it was unjust to link participation in the exposition to actions by Congress on unrelated matters, but as in so many other phases of the fair's history, politics could not be separated from the fate of the exposition.

The board of directors obviously was not well positioned to influence political events in other states. Therefore, the chief burden of winning over the states and territories fell to the national commission and its adjunct, the Board of Lady Managers. Every state had two representatives on the commission and two alternates; the Board of Lady Managers was structured in the same manner. Thus every state and territory had eight prominent citizens who were already actively committed to the Columbian Exposition and who could provide the nucleus of a pro-fair lobbying effort at the state level.

Director General Davis undertook the task of marshalling local legislative support, supplying the commissioners with a comprehensive political strategy that they could adjust to fit local circumstances. He urged the commissioners to stage a statewide convention on the fair and invite representatives of business, education, banking, and social oganizations to attend. The convention, he said, should be held in the state's largest city and the mayor as well as the governor should be given prominent roles in the proceedings. The convention should lead to the creation of a private corporation which would sell stock to the public, the proceeds to be used to assemble state exhibits for the fair. The state corporation in turn should propose that the legislature pass a law creating a state board of world's fair commissioners and appropriate funds matching those raised by the stock sales. Davis thoughtfully mailed the commissioners a model bill that they could modify as they wished and 21

White City in Peril submit to their legislatures.

Davis's plan proved more useful in some states than in others. However, a review of fair legislation passed by the various states and territories shows that his model bill was the basis for much of it. Most states and territories did create world's fair boards and provide funds to support exhibits. Virtually all of the state and territorial fair boards used part of those funds to build structures at Jackson Park which served as clubhouses for state residents and as sites for specialized historical. literary, artistic, and natural resource exhibits.

Although much depended on the activity of state world's fair boards, relatively little is yet known about their operations. The exposition's management relied upon them in several important ways. They were the primary mechanism for distributing information about the fair to farmers, manufacturers, and other potential exhibitors. Davis also counted upon them to encourage their fellow citizens to apply for display space at the fair. Furthermore, they were expected to raise the funds to provide state-sponsored exhibits in addition to those of private business. For example, many of the displays in the Forestry, Fisheries, Mines and Mining, Agriculture, and Horticulture buildings were state exhibits paid for with public funds . Finally, the state boards were encouraged to publicize the fair in the local press to promote attendance.

State boards varied in size and composition.

Some had less than a dozen members while others numbered thirty or more. A few states excluded women, but most included at least the state representatives to the Board of Lady Managers. The vast majority of state boards had equal representation from the Democratic and Republican parties. In some states the world's fair boards chose to promote their activities at the local level by organizing county or congressional district committees. In virtually every state the board worked with trade associations, chambers of commerce, farmers' organizations, universities, and other groups.

Each board had a professional executive director often called the executive commissioner. Besides carrying out board policies, this individual worked with fair officials in Chicago to coordinate national and local activ-

22

ity. Executive commissioners formed a national network which permitted them to exchange ideas and information.

The Board of Lady Managers, like the national commission, also used their members to stimulate local support. State representatives to the board made contact with women's clubs and women's literary societies and asked them to collect and donate exhibits. At the urging of President Bertha Palmer, women at the state level collected statistics on women's organizations and the numbers of women working outside the home.

Those laboring on behalf of the exposition in the states and territories could rely on help from Chicago. Officers of the national commission, the Board of Lady Managers, and the Illinois corporation's board of directors welcomed invitations to address world's fair meetings and sessions of state legislatures. Occasionally, entire delegations of directors, lady managers, and commissioners would descend on a state to endorse publicly the work of local organizers. But the best sales device for the fair was the fair itself. By the spring of 1892 the white palaces had started to take shape, and the grandeur of the exposition was evident.

Soon state world's fair boards and legislative committees began arriving in Chicago to be briefed on the progress of the fair and to tour the grounds. It is a measure of their concern over state and territorial participation in the fair that Daniel Burnham and other fair officials devoted hours to these groups at the very time they were racing to finish construction before opening day.

The national commission and the Board of Lady Managers could take pride in their success in organizing the states and territories.

Incredible effort was needed to win over state legislatures and to reach down to the towns and farms of America and enlist countless thousands to contribute samples of their products and handicrafts. Yet without that effort the exposition surely would have foundered.

State and local fair organizations accounted for more than half of the exhibits at Jackson Park. The state buildings, located at the north end of the grounds, were major attractions for visitors. Most important, broad local support for the fair helped stimulate attendance.

White City in Peril

Construction of the Administration Building. Long before completion of the /air's buildings, the /air's Department of Foreign R elations turned its energies to attracting foreign participants. Photograph by C. D. Arnold.

Twenty-eight million people passed through the gates at Jackson Park, most of them Americans. Without their attendance too the fair would have been a financial failure.

The possibility of financial failure was ever present, and as the cost of building the White City rapidly escalated, new sources of funding had to be found. The board of directors and the national commission, whatever their other differences , agreed that the fair must in all respects be the greatest ever held . Moreover, a number of particular factors for ce d continuous upward revisions in the budget estimates. Preparing the sandy, desolate wastes of Jackson Park for fair purposes cost more than half a million dollars. The decision to build structures that were aesthetically important as well as fun ctional meant heavy expenditures for good design and artistic embellishments.

Most important, the national commission developed a classification pla n for the exhibits so extensive that more and larger exposition buildings had to be constructed to accommod a te the huge numbers of displays. Before May 1, 1893, the board of directors of the world's fair corporation had to raise more

than $20 million. The search for these dollars required the Chicago businessmen to plunge deeply into the political process.

In April 1890, the Chicagoans had $5 million in pledges to purchase stock in the world's fair corporation. Congress, however, required the company to raise an additional $5 million as one of the conditions to be met before the President would issue his invitation to other nations to participate. The board of directors first tried to raise this extra amount by simply selling more stock. Despite vigorous sales efforts, only about $1 million of the new stock issue was purchased. The board then turned to the city of Chicago and suggested that the city sell $5 million worth of municipal bonds for the support of the fair. Mayor DeWitt C. Creiger and the city council, while agreeable, pointed out that Chicago had reached the limit of its borrowing authority as specified in the Illinois state constitution. Only an amendment to the constitution raising the debt limit would allow the city to sell bonds on behalf of the exposition. The Illinois state constitution could be amended if both houses of the legislature and the governor agreed and if the

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White City in Peril proposition received a majority vote at the next general election. Although a state election was scheduled for November, the legislature had already adjourned and would not meet again in regular session until 1891.

Throughout the summer of 1890 the board of directors, headed by Vice President Thomas B. Bryant and with the assistance of Mayor Creiger and the city council, lobbied in Spnngfield. Governor Joseph Fifer agreed to call a special session of the legislature which finally approved the needed constitutional amendment and placed it on the November ballot. A large majority of the lllinois voters endorsed the proposal. With the anticipated proceeds of the bond sale and its capital stock, the directors now commanded between $10 and $11 million, far more than had been spent on any previous world's fair.

By the spring of 1891, however, the board of directors' Committee on Auditing warned that many more millions would be needed unless the scope of the exposition was reduced and strong economies enforced. The board of directors did reduce staff and cut the salaries of its officers by half, but it was not willing to compromise on the plans for the exposition.

Realizing that there was no more money to be obtained from the city or from stock sales, the board focused on the possibilities of federal government subsidies and corporate borrowing. Indeed , these two potential sources of funds were closely related. Since the financial problems of the exposition were well known, there was little likelihood that banks would purchase bonds issued by the world's fair corporation. A federal appropriation for the fair, however, not only would mean additional dollars but also would instantly grant the corporation a high credit rating.

The timing of the request for federal aid could hardly have been worse. In 1892, the hotly contested presidential campaign dominated the national scene. Democrats, for example, charged President Harrison and the Republicans with squandering the treasury surplus and sought to portray themselves as hardfisted fiscal conservatives opposed to all unnecessary expenditures. Southern Democratic members of the House of Representatives had a special reason for opposing money

24

for the exposition; they feared for their reelection because of challenges from the insurgent Populist party. As Congress had rejected a Populist plan to establish a federal loan program to help farmers, southern Democrats felt they could not vote money for a fair without handing their opponents a major campaign issue. And of course it was understood by everyone that New York's congressional delegation would do all it could to embarrass the Chicago fair.

The national commission and the board of directors attacked the problem with vigor.

Director General Davis planned the strategy and directed the campaign to win congressional approval of the world's fair appropriation. The directors spent thousands of dollars to maintain lobbyists in Washington.

Moses Handy and his staff filled the nation's newspapers with stories favorable to the fair and the appropriation. Delegations of exposition officials and state and city office holders visited congressmen in their Capitol Hill offices asking for their votes. The supporters of the exposition argued that the fair was a national enterprise; the faith, honor, and reputation of the United States was at stake.

Congress, they said , would harm America's international image if it did not insure the fair's success. Moreover, said the representatives of the board of directors, the main reason the exposition's costs had exceeded projections was because the national commission had insisted on a scheme of exhibit classification more complex than that of any earlier world's fair. Since the commission was an arm of the United States government, Congress had an obligation to fund its plans.

In early 1892, the House of Representatives' subcommittee on the world's fair visited Chicago and conducted a thorough review of the fair 's funding and progress. The subcommittee, obviously impressed, strongly endorsed the appropriation. evertheless, the bill languished in committee, and months passed without action. Tension mounted in the Chicago offices of the world's fair management. Nearly $1 million a month was being spent on construction. At that rate exposition funds soon would be exhausted and the white palaces left incomplete. Department chiefs

White City in Peril worried that there would not be enough money to install exhibits in the buildings.

At this critical juncture the world's fair lobbyists changed tactics. Working through the United States Senate, they managed to attach the $5 million appropriation (in the form of 10 million souvenir half dollar coins) to a bill providing supplemental funding for several executive departments of the government. Since this bill had to pass if these departments were to continue functioning, the lobbyists felt they had outmaneuvered their opponents in the House of Representatives. The House, however, quickly rejected the bill precisely because it contained money for the fair. A conference committee of the two houses failed to resolve the issue. When the Senate insisted on its version of the bill, southern Democrats in the House of Representatives launched a filibuster in July and August that lasted weeks.

Calling the exposition appropriation "a raid on the treasury," the southerners swore they would talk as long as necessary to have it removed from the general funding bill. As the weather grew hotter in Washington and the election drew closer, more and more representatives left for home. There was a real danger that one or both houses would lose a quorum and all legislative business would halt.

Gradually it became apparent to the southerners and to George Davis that some compromise had to be reached. The southerners did not relish the idea of being blamed for shutting down the federal government just before an election; Davis feared presiding over the financial collapse of the whole world's fair organization. An agreement finally was reached whereby the appropriation was cut in half; the government would coin only 5 million silver half dollars for the fair.

There. were, however, several strings attached to the federal money. The most significant was a requirement that the exposition be closed on Sunday. Sabbatarians had been trying without success for two years to persuade the fair's management to shut the gates on Sunday. Both the directors and the commissioners had ignored the numerous petitions from church congregations around the nation. Publicly they argued that Sunday closing would discriminate against laborers who

worked six days a week. Privately they reasoned that the fair's shaky finances would not be helped by closing for twenty-four days during the brief six-month run of the exposition. When fair officials sought federal funds , the Sabbatarians saw an opportunity to achieve their goal. Petitions signed by millions of fundamentalist Christians poured into congressional offices. Although liberal churches and organized labor tried to counter the pressure, Congress capitulated and made Sunday closing part of the fair appropriation. Davis and the directors were too desperate to argue but harbored hopes that Congress would remove the restriction after the appropriation had been passed. It did not and the Sunday closing issue harassed fair officials even after the fair opened. The issue was finally resolved in the courts, which permitted the gates to remain open on Sunday.

The reduced appropriation and the Sunday closing provision disappointed fair managers.

Yet they soon saw that George Davis was right in claiming that a great victory had been won anyway. Many of the half dollars commanded twice their face value as souvenirs. Even when Congress in 1893 voted to shift nearly $500,000 of the coins from the board of directors to the commission to pay for the exposition's awards program, the corporation still realized more that $2,500,000 from their sale.

Within weeks of winning congressional approval for the appropriation, the directors successfully marketed $5 million in corporate bonds. With that the last great barrier to a successful world's fair had been crossed.

The site question, relations between the world's fair corporation and the national commission, the challenge of winning support from foreign and state governments, and the funding crisis were the most serious problems the fair faced. Failure to resolve satisfactorily any of them could have meant no fair at all or one far less grand than that actually built.

Finding solutions frequently led them into politics and involved them in national issues and required as much drive and imagination as Burnham and the artists had brought to the physical design and building of the fair. They made Burnham's work possible.

If the leaders of the Columbian Exposition

25

Construction of Fisheries Building archway. The completion of thefair buildings and the success of the exposition depended on the cooperation of the national and local planning interests.

proved equal to the enormous task of creating a great world's fair, they themselves were not unchanged by the experience. In the beginning commissioners and directors alike were motivated by largely parochial concerns. The directors reflected a fierce local pride in what their city had become since the great fire of 1871. Commissioners were mainly concerned with the touting of their own state and region's interests. By the end of the fair, both groups had matured. They clearly had developed a national and a global view. At the closing of the fair, directors and commissioners predictably considered the meaning of it all.

While acknowledging the commercial and economic benefits of the exposition, they reflected on the fair's contribution to world 26

peace , international cooperation, and the general improvement of mankind. The fair, they believed, had been a great educator that mornlly uplifted the masses through exposing them to art and science.

Whatever its moral impact, the fair was an undisputed success. At the time and ever since, the sheer dazzle of its appearance has impressed nearly everyone and earned enduring fame for the architects and artists who created it. Yet the visual success of the fair has diverted attention from other very important aspects of its history. The Columbian Exposition stood at the intersection of major historical trends. At the very time technology, industrialization , urbanization, and immigration were reshaping American society, the nation prepared to assert itself as a major force in international affairs.

White City in Peril as it was an artistic milestone. But understanding the role of leadership in the fair offers more than an explanation of how the resources were acquired to enable Burnham to erect the White City. The fair was rooted in the politics of late nineteenth-century America .

The very fact that the managers were forced to participate in the political process and to mediate the claims of aggressive interest groups to be part of the great show guaranteed that the exposition would be more than a festive occasion. The leaders of the fair had to discover new methods for managing large and complex enterprises that required both the expertise and financial assets of businessmen and the assent of many levels of government.

From this point of view the Columbian Exposition established a path linking public and private resources and interests that has become familiar in modern times.

For Further Reading

--------Rapid social change found expression in politics. Farmers, workers, corporations, women, blacks, southerners, moral and social reformers sought to advance their interests through government action. The fair, which was dependent on government cooperation, offered a unique opportunity for these groups both to publicize and to promote their programs. The exposition's managers could not escape dealing with social and political issues that were seemingly irrelevant to their purposes without risk ofjeopardizing the support of city, state, and federal authorities. That the board of directors and the national commission coped with these powerful pressures and built perhaps the greatest of the world's fairs is truly remarkable.

The Columbian Exposition was fully as much a political and organizational triumph

Two relatively recent histories of the Columbian Exposition are David F. Burg, Chicago's White City of 1893 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1976) and R. Reid Badger, The Great American Fair: The World's Columbian Exposition and American Culture (C hicago: Nelson Hall, 1980). An interesting analysis of the role of women can be found in Jeanne Madeline Weimann, The Fair Women (Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1981). Forthe best description of Chicago and its society and politics at the time of the fair, see Bessie Louise Pierce, A History of Chicago: Vol. 111, The Rise of a Modem City (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press , 1957). Extensive descriptions of the buildings and exhibits are provided by Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Book of the Fair (Chicago: The Bancroft Company, 1895).

The1·e are rich sources of contemporary documents pertinent to an understanding of the Columbian Exposition. Two important volumes are Thomas W. Palmer, "Report of the President of the World's Columbian Commission," an unpublished manuscript dated 1896 in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. , and Harlow Higginbotham , Final Report of the President of the Board of Directors of the World 's Columbian Exposition (Chicago: Rand , McNally & Co .. 1898). See also "M inutes of the Board of Directors, World's Columbian Exposition" and "Minutes of the Council of Administration of the World's Columbian Exposition" in the Manuscripts Collections at the Chicago Historical Societ>·· The most revealing information about the fair's administration and leadership can be gleaned from the pages of the Chicago Tribune and other contem porary newspapers.

27

Everything Under One Roof: World's Fairs and Department Stores in Paris and Chicago

By Russell Lewis

International expositions and depart ment stores developed simultaneously in the nineteenth-century city. Each offered an array of comforts, conveniences, and entertainment, and together they defined a new urban ideal based on consumption.

IN OCTOBER 1889, Edward T.Jeffery, president of the Illinois Central Railroad , was sent to Paris by Chicago's Mayor Dewitt C. Creiger and the city's Citizen's Executive Committee to study the Universal Exposition of 1889. From Jeffery they hoped to learn what was involved in organizing, financing, and running a world's fair so they could prepare their proposal to host in Chicago the exposition celebrating the 400th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America scheduled for 1892.

Most important, they wanted a full and comprehensive account of the 1889 fair so that they could create an exposition that would surpass it. After six weeks of intensive research Jeffery submitted a detailed guide to securing exhibits, constructing buildings, financing, providing transportation, and managing the general business affairs involved in a world's fair. In his conclusion he offered this encouragement:

Let the achievement of France in 1889 stimulate us to a similar though greater undertaking. If it be urged that time at our command is rather limited for its full accomplishment and complete presentment, let us cast these doubts aside, and unhesitatingly believe that with our intense energy, our unbounded patriotism, our enthusiastic enterprise, our keen inventive genius, our vigorous in-

Russell Lewis is assistant editor of Chicago History.

28

dustries, our unrivaled mechanical skill, our incomparable material resources, and our financial strength, we can push to a satisfactory completion "The World's Exposition of 1892." [Paris Universal Exposition, 1889]

The rest of the nation was not as confident as Jeffery that Chicago was capable of creating a world's fair that would be worthy of the Republic. While Chicago had the requisite energy, commitment, and money to complete the project, the city lacked refinement and

The English jewelry department at the Paris World's Fair of 1867. Elaborate displays of consumer goods, which appealed to the growing middle class, were first introduced in French expositions in 1855 and became standard features of world's fairs. (~ I .. l

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experience with culture. Under French stewardship, aesthetic achievement had become one of the goals of exposition organizers. Indeed, fears were voiced that what would come about in Chicago would be only an enlarged western agricultural fair "with fat cattle, and prize pigs galore .. . " instead of a proper tribute to the nation. A world's fair in Chicago, many easterners complained , would be a missed opportunity for America to make a good showing before the rest of the world.

But Chicago succeeded, and there was general agreement that the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 had surpassed Paris's 1889 fair. "Every American can go and congratulate himself," announced Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, "that we have not only excelled, but in many respects surpassed the great expositions of the old world." Evidence of this achievement was found in the art and -architecture of the fair. The Columbian Exposition was acclaimed unanimously as an aesthetic marvel, which created a vision of beauty and harmony unequaled in modern history. "And because the harmony thus revealed on so grand a scale .. . ," exclaimed contemporary art critic Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer, and "because the items of beauty and impressiveness are so many and varied yet so concordant ... you will behold a sight which ... has not been paralleled since the Rome of the emperors stood intact." For Arthur Sherburne Hardy, editor of Cosmopolitan Mazazine, the fair was the greatest artistic achievement in the history of mankind: "But if history tells us any one conception more stupendous, or greater variety and unity, whose strength was more uplifting and beauty more entrancing than this-we do not believe it!"

To many Americans, the Columbian Exposition represented a momentous break with European traditions. It signaled the ebb of European dominance of the arts in America and the emergence of both an American appreciation for beauty and a distinct national art. For others there were not any new "American" contributions in the architecture of the fair; it was an eclectic amalgamation derived from classical and Renaissance styles.

Debate over its artistic achievement, if any, began immediately and still continues, but in fact there are other aspects of the fair that were more important. The 1893 fair is a benchmark in the emergence of a consumer society whose history can best be understood through a study of the origins and development of the international exposition as a mass retailing institution in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. The growth of expositions is linked directly to a consumer revolution centered in Paris. Another modern urban institution, the department store, traces

29

Under One Roof to this revolution and like the exposition helped make Paris the consumption capital of the world. The Columbian Exposition, like its European predecessors, was also linked to the development of department stores, although the role these stores played in the development of urban life in Chicago was far different.

Expositions and the Consumer Revolution The 1851 "Exhibition of Works of Industry of All Nations" in London's Hyde Park was the first attempt by any nation to gather together examples of engineering and decorative arts from around the world. Although Thomas Paxton's Crystal Palace, a novel construction of glass and iron, created a tremendous amount of popular appeal, the displays themselves were aimed to reach the more specialized audience composed of industrialists, investors, and engineers. Exhibits were organized according to the stages of production (extraction, manufacture , transportation, and

trade). Prince Albert supported the exhibition enthusiastically in the hope that it would encourage the exchange of industrial knowledge and techniques among nations, for he believed that the growth of commerce and industry was a necessary step to creating a new era of world peace and prosperity. The many displays of British industrial powers were offered as instructive examples.

By focusing attention on the mechanics of production, the Great Exhibition in London was merely an international version of the national industrial shows common in France and England in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. The first French exposition of international scope held in 1855, however, was a marked departure from the Crystal Palace exhibition. In Paris the focus shifted from the industrial revolution as seen in machinery and industrial processes to the consumer revolution as evidenced by a wealth of goods themselves. The

Between 1851 and 1871, Napoleon 1ll demolished large sections of Paris as part of the plan that transformed it from a congested, dirty, medieval city into the most modern and spacious capital of the world.

30

Under One Roof origins of this consumer revolution are found in the movement of French court life in the eighteenth century from Versailles to the city of Paris and the changes that followed the rebuilding of Paris during the Second Empire.

The enjoyment of discretionary spending was confined originally to nobility, something that Louis XIV and the court of Versailles in seventeenth-century France superbly expressed. Louis's court was also renowned for refined exquisite taste and impeccable manners and in France especially consumption later became tied to specific ideas about taste, behavior, and fashion that formed another ideal of what it was to be civilized.

With the movement of the aristocracy from the country estates to the salons of Paris in the eighteenth century, the capital became both the new center of consumption and of court life, but it was court life increasingly opened to the bourgeoisie. Rosalind Williams has recently written in Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in

Late Nineteenth Century France: The salon provided an environment of consumption that united the brilliance of the court and the intimacy of the house ... as a setting for social exchanges, salons did much to promote similarity in manners, ideas, tastes, and attitudes between nobles and bourgeoisie two groups separated by legal distinctions and social origins, [but] united by economic privilege .... these two groups were slowly consolidating into a united upper class, largely because they came to share a common environment of consumption.

As a result, the ideal of courtly consumption not only survived the fall of the monarchy and the hereditary aristocracy in the French Revolution, but soon spread, embracing the middle classes in the early nineteenth century.

As greater numbers joined the ranks of the bourgeoisie, the demand for consumer goods increased, and Paris, which was underindustrialized (in large part because of a special tax on goods and raw materials entering the city), ironically became the city in

Under Emperor Napoleon Ill Paris became famous for its pleasant parks and promenades, and for the cafes and restaurants along its broad, tree-lined boulevards.

-...' _'; 1.

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Under One Roof

The iron and glass Crystal Palace in London's Hyde Park was the site of the 1851 "Exhibition of Works of lndusty of All Nations," the first attempt to gather in one place examples of engineering and decorative arts from around the world. Gift of Mrs. Stuyvesant Peabody.

which consumption began to flourish as a middle-class urban ideal. This can be attributed to the fact that not all goods were equally attractive to the bourgeoisie . Cheap massproduced goods, like those from England, were not as desirable as the handmade, finely crafted products for which Paris was known, and which because of their uniqueness conferred on the buyer a greater sense of social status. These demands, along with the special tax discouraging industrialization in Paris, assured the proliferation of small workshops where skilled artisans produced specialty goods for the local market. In 184 7---48, less than ten per cent of Parisian-made goods were exported. Having grown in response to lavish aristocratic tastes, Parisian artisans supplied the French bourgeoisie's demands for luxury items. But the setting and the mechanics for their distribution were about to change.

The development of mass retailing techniques in the first half of the nineteenth century made shopping a more pleasant experience and encouraged greater consumption.

32

The earliest changes came in the 1830s and 1840s again in Paris in dry goods stores called rnagasins de nouveautes, or novelty stores. These stores were very different from the small, guild-run, specialty stores that traditionally handled only a limited number of items and bargained with customers over prices. Increased production of goods enabled dry goods stores to buy in larger quantities and sell at low prices and still make substantial profits.

They began to revolutionize retailing and consumption by carrying a greater variety of goods, introducing fixed prices, encouraging inspection of merchandise, and permitting the return of purchased items.

In spite of the Parisian bourgeoisie's growing commitment to consumption and luxury, the physical congestion of the city retarded the full realization of mass retailing and consumption as an urban ideal. Transport of goods and easy movement of customers across the city was almost impossible, and the clientele of the new dry goods stores, like traditional shops, was restricted to residents of the im-

Under One Roof

Bu ilding constructed f or the 1867 world's f air in Paris. This elliptical structure, which covered thirty-seven acres in the Champ de Mars, was meant lo be a model of the world.

mediate vicinity. The center of Paris was still a medieval city when Louis Napoleon Bonaparte proclaimed himself emperor in 1851.

The labyrinth of dark narrow ancient streets on the Right Bank impeded the movement of air, people, and vehicles. Filthy streets and open sewers abounded and the threat of infectious diseases (cholera broke out in 1832 and again in 1849) was always present. Public order was a problem too. Barricades were easily erected by dissident citizens in the narrow winding streets during insurrections, and congestion hampered the movement of troops to restore order. Such impediments could only be overcome by the physical transformation of the city which , when it finally occurred under Napoleon 111 and Baron Georges Haussmann during the 1850s and 1860s, greatly stimulated the growth of consumption and the development of new institutions of mass retailing.

The first result of the rebuilding of Paris was to make the malodorous , congested capital into a convenient, safe, and comfortable city. Between 1851 and 1871, large sections of

the Right Bank's slums were demolished to make way for wide arteries that for the first time truly interconnected the city. The broad , straight, and long avenues that replaced the medieval streets increased the flow of traffic and helped to alleviate much of the congestion. The y also eased the minds of the bourgeoisie about threats to the public order.

Barricading became impractical, troop movement more rapid. Health conditions were greatly improved as well : the slum demolition made epidemics less likely and admitted more fresh air and sunlight to the city; an ambitious park program introduced open space to city dwellers ; and a new sewer system and the supply of fresh water made the city far more livable. No longer a barrier to the bourgeoisie's urban ideal , Paris quickly became the center for the eilloresence of a culture of consumption during the Second Empire.

In addition to making his capital healthier, safer, more convenient , and more comfortable , Napoleon 111 also wanted to make Paris the most beautiful city in the world , and 33

The Palais de Trocadero was built for the 1878 Paris exposition. Despite the fall of the Second Empire in 1871, France continued lo host on a regular basis increasingly lavish world's fairs.

many agreed that he succeeded. His rebuilding transformed the city into a display of material wealth and property that was not to be equaled in the nineteenth century. The pleasant parks with promenades and the magnificent tree-lined boulevards with their many cafes and restaurants made Paris the center of fashion and luxury. Its architecture in particular presented sumptuous and elaborate spectacles. Buildings like the new Louvre additions and the Opera were bombastic in their display of opulence and luxury. By making Paris his palace, Napoleon III made every citizen a participant in the display of national wealth and prosperity. The city itself became what the court at Versailles once was , the aristocracy was replaced by the bourgeoisie, and the ideal of civilization became dominated by the idea of consumption.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, it had become clear that industrial production would advance only as long as consumption continued to increase. Mass production required not only a system of retailing larger, more efficient, and more regularized than that

34

of the traditional specialty shop, but also a form of advertising that would appeal to the consumers' curiosity, imagination , vanity, and pride. France, which had lagged behind more industrialized nations in the first half of the nineteenth century, took the lead in mass retailing and advertising during the latter half when selling rather than production was the primary economic problem. It was during this period that the international exposition and the department store evolved simultaneously in France in response to the cons umer's demand for images of luxury and abundance, entertainment, and greater availability and variety of goods. Together they made Paris the world capital for consumption.

In 1855 the French opened their first international exposition. Unlike the English, they emphasized final products rather than the means of production. They featured the luxury goods for which Paris was famous , and stressed social progress and artistic achievement over industrial might. But the most important change was the policy that all items carry price tags, something that highlighted

Under One Roof the new emphasis on sales, advertising, prizes, and other aspects of consumption.

Twelve years later, the 1867 Paris exposition represented a fuller expression of consumption and the display of prosperity that typified the Second Empire at its height. An ambitious plan to make it the most comprehensive exposition to date necessitated abandoning the 1855 Palais de l'Industrie as an exhibition space and building an entirely new structure. The new exhibition space, covering thirty-seven acres in the Champ de Mars, was an elliptical structure of glass and iron that was meant to be a model of the world (an earlier plan for a circular building was changed because of space limitations). The ellipse was formed by a series of concentric rings intersected at regular intervals by avenues radiating from an open oval court in the center to the outer circumference of the building. Each pie-shaped section was devoted to the exhibits of one nation , and in each ring were collected all the displays from each of the ten classifications of exhibits. Thus by walking the entire length of a ring one could see, for instance, all displays of furniture and other household objects, or clothing and fabrics.

The vast display of the great variety of articles available within any category was an exciting and stimulating experience for the consumer who could walk the rings and do some comparative shopping. The elaborate display of elegant French products (almost half of the ellipse was devoted to French exhibits) highlighted France's achievements for the rest of the world and bolstered her reputation as the world's most prosperous nation. This display technique , with its emphasis on comparison of products from around the world, was a novel feature and a break with past expositions. By organizing the world by its products under one enormous roof, the 1867 exposition anticipated the development of the modern department store , and by its focus on the exotic, the exposition made entertainment and consumption increasingly synonymous activities.

This new type of exposition continued in Paris even after the demise of apoleon III and the end of the Second Empire in 1871. In fact , the Paris world 's fair of 1878 was more lavish and comprehensive than any previous

exposition, covering more than 100 acres in the Champ de Mars. The elliptical form of the 1867 exposition was dropped in favor of a rectangular plan and more flamboyant architecture , and a new exposition building and exhibit area, the Palais de Trocadero, built across the Seine from the main exposition grounds. Whatever prestige France had lost in the Franco-Prussian War she regained through her undiminished displays of abundance.

Over the years these expositions put entertainment before education. By the 1889 fair, technology played an increasing role in the realization of novel fantasies and spectacles.

The fair's greatest and most enduring monument was the Eiffel Tower, a 300-meter structure that straddled the Champ de Mars. A technical tour-de-force, the Eiffel Tower was quickly condemned by French artists and intellectuals as a disgrace to Paris, but it was adored by the public for the vista it offered and as a novel landmark. But the most fantastic spectacles at the 1889 fair were created with electricity. The magical land created by electricity, long before it had become a common fixture in homes and businesses, included illuminated fountains , falling rainbows, glittering jewels, and magnificent spotlights placed atop the Eiffel Tower that made every evening at the exposition a special event. The Rue de Caire, a replica of a street in Cairo complete with bazaars, Arabs, donkeys, and belly dancers, was a popular attraction that continued on a larger scale than before the practice of recreating exotic attractions for fairgoers .

Architecturally, the 1889 exposition continued the emphasis on monumentality characteristic of previous expositions.

Department Stores and the Urban Ideal Department stores developed in ways similar to expositions for they too served the needs for new merchandising methods and met the demands of the consumer. Once Paris was transformed to allow for easy access to most parts of the city, several large stores opened to serve the entire city. They considered every citizen a potential customer. The Samaritaine opened in 1866, the Magazins Reunis in 1867, and the Belle Jardiniere in 1868. The Bon Marche, which first opened as a magasin de 35

Under One Roof nouveautes in 1852, established itself as the first modern department store in Paris in 1869 when it moved to a larger and more elaborate building, designed to enhance mass retailing.

The purpose of the department store was not only to sell the goods off the shelf, but to sell the idea of consumption to the public.

According to historian Michael B. Miller, the Bon Marche did both extremely well: Mass markets demanded a wizardry that could stir unrealized appetites, provoke overpowering urges, create new states of mind . Selling consumption was a matter of seduction and showmanship . .. that turned buying into an irresistable occasion. Dazzling and sensuous, the Bon Marche became a permanent fair, an institution , a fantasy world , a spectacle of extraordinary proportions, so that going to the store became an event and an adventure .... This ambiance , in conjunction with the powerful temptation of vast display, was to be the great luring feature of the Bon Marche. [The Bon Marchi, 1981]

Department stores provided comfort, pleasure, and amusement, every service and every desire under its all-encompassing roof Customers visiting the Bon Marche, for instance, could visit the second floor reading room, painting gallery, or buffet, and prompt and courteous service was always guaranteed .

But the fantastic and elaborate displays created for these stores were the most effective way to attract the public. Special sales in particular became occasions to use elaborate theatrical effects that would dramatically transform the interior of a store into an exotic setting from a distant land or a wonderful dream world. Patrons visited department stores out of the desire to gaze at the display of splendor.

Going to these stores was a special excursion , and more often than not a purchase somewhere along the way would be part of the adventure. Department store owners like the Bon Marche's Aristide Boucciaut realized this and as early as 1872 actually began to promote his store as a tourist attraction. Significantly, Boucciaut also supported French fairs , which were good for his business and in which he often displayed merchandise.

Within the new Paris, department stores and expositions both served the same function of selling consumption to the public and developing an urban market. The department 36

store became a principal urban institution and a focal point of the city for the bourgeoisie. It gave purpose to urban living by providing images of prosperity and luxury, comfortable surroundings, and entertainment and began to shape the character of bourgeois culture itself French expositions, like the d epartment store, were an extension of Parisian life, onl y they presented the urban ideal of consumption on a much grander scale and for all the world to see. The exposition was a great organ for advertising not only the material progress of France and other nations but also for promoting Paris as a model city.

Chicago department store owners, not surprisingly, were active supporters of the World's Columbian Exposition , and they saw in this event an opportunity for promotion by drawing attention to the similarities between their stores and the fair. Although Chicago department stores did not evolve simultaneously with expositions as was true in Paris, one key to understanding the place of the 1893 world's fair in the city's history nevertheless lies in the development of Chicago's department stores.

The development of Lake Street into something more than the typical nineteenthcentury American mercantile center was due largely to Potter Palmer, who opened a dry goods store there in 1852. Not content to cater to the " pioneer taste " of Chicagoans , Palmer brought the latest fashions and "novelties" from the East to his store and displayed them invitingly. Within a few years his was widely acknowledged as the most fashionable dry goods store in Chicago. Palmer distinguished himself by making service on a grand scale the cornerstone of his business.

The practice of guaranteeing satisfaction with each purchase, still uncommon at that time in America and virtually unknown in Chicago, was publicly announced in 1861 in the Chicago Tribune. Making shopping pleasurable was Palmer's goal, and he succeeded admirably by introducing moderate prices, a liberal credit policy, varied and plentiful goods, courteous and helpful clerks, and spacious and commodious surroundings. The store offered respite from the mud and general unpleasantness of Lake Street, and Palmer's store soon earned a reputation for attractiveness, con-

Under One Roof

Like world's fairs, department stores offered comfort, convenience, and entertainment as well as attractive displays of merchandise. Photograph courtesy of Marshall Field & Company.

venience, and comfort. His business was enormously profitable and grew rapidly. He expanded into the wholesale business, opened a New York office , and in 1863 added the building next door to his Chicago store.

In failing health, Palmer sold his entire stock and business to two young and ambitious merchants, Levi Z. Leiter and Marshall Field, in January 1865 (Palmer had agreed to remain a partner until he could be bought out). Business prospered and within two years the two young partners were able to assume complete ownership of the firm and introduce a new name to Palmer's old store: Field, Leiter & Co. This store continued Palmer's policy of serving the public with courtesy and reliable merchandise. Improvements to Lake Street over the years had helped the store make a more favorable impression on the public. The estab-

lishment of new street grades and the raising of most of the buildings on Lake Street above the level of the river channeled the flow of rainwater into the river instead of allowing it to collect in stagnant pools in tfie street. The paving of the street with Nicholson wood blocks vastly improved the appearance and cleanliness of the street, and the new store made a point to keep its street frontage swept.

Yet mud still collected between the blocks on wet days, the stench of the river in summer was overpowering, and the street was always overcrowded.

At about the same time that Napoleon III was completing his rebuilding of Paris, Potter Palmer was busy engineering his own transformation of Chicago. Palmer had determined that Lake Street , though vastly improved since his arrival there, could not be 37

Looking north from the colonnade at the World'.s Columbian Exposition, 1893. The cleanliness, orderliness, and beauty of the exposition were in sharp contrast to the dirt, confusion, and unsightliness of the surrounding city. Photograph by C. D. Arnold.

developed much further. The river and the railroad line hemmed it in and limited expansion, and Palmer feared that a restriction on the growth of the mercantile and financial district might slow the commercial growth of the entire city and prevent Chicago from reaching its full potential. Through shrewd real estate speculation, Palmer hoped to engineer the transplanting of Chicago's main retail business center from Lake Street to State Street.

Though at that time State Street was little more than a narrow unpaved lane lined with poorly built wooden boardinghouses, saloons, and small shops, it still displayed potential for expansion into the commercial center of the city. Its main advantage was that the major South Side horsecar lines converged there with the major West Side lines, making it one of the most accessible points in the city. After buying most of the frontage property along a three-quarter-mile strip of State Street south from Lake Street, Palmer moved the buildings on his property back from the street and convinced other owners to follow his example.

The result was a hundred-foot-wide boulevard that showed great potential for the kind of commercial development that would make shopping a more pleasurable experience.

38

Palmer's great plans for State Street became evident when he built the first of his magnificent Palmer House hotels at the corner of Quincy and State streets and a six-story, marble-fronted "dry goods palace" farther north at Washington. The shift from the old mercantile center to the new was symbolically complete when Palmer persuaded Field, Leiter & Co., who had succeeded Palmer as the most influential merchants in the city, to occupy his new State Street store. State Street was still unpaved when Field and Leiter opened in the new store in October 1868, but the stately appearance of the building made a grand inpression . The interior v.-as even more astounding. Richly decorated with plentiful gas lighting fixtures, frescoed walls, large mirrors, walnut counters , and large carpeted areas, it was easily the most beautiful store in Chicago. The grand opening was a memorable event in Chicago's history, drawing thousands of curious visitors and a host of spectators along the street. "No institution in Chicago, whatever its character," proclaimed the Chicago Times , "ever drew so large an assemblage together at opening day." By 1871, thirty new marble-front buildings had been built along the new boulevard, and State

Under One Roof Street was on its way to becoming one of the world's greatest shopping districts.

The consumer revolution, however, came much later to Chicago than to Paris. Despite all of Potter Palmer's efforts to introduce luxurious surroundings to Chicago and to promote shopping as entertainment, it was not until the 1880s that consumption became an important part of urban life. This was because wholesale business had taken precedence over retailing among Chicago merchants. In fact, many of the first major American department stores, including Marshall Field & Co., had begun as small adjuncts to large wholesale businesses. Retail sales were often limited to only one floor of the multi-story marble palaces along State Street. Chicago's central location along water routes, and later in the national railway network, had made it a major distribution center and had fostered the development of large-scale wholesale merchants. Chicago's wholesale market included small town dry goods stores and rural general stores throughout the Midwest and the West.

The rapid growth of urban markets in the 1880s however made retailing more profitable than wholesaling, and local merchants began to show more interest in the Chicago market.

The major obstacle to the development of mass retailing in Chicago was the city itself.

Women did not find Chicago's commercial district particularly attractive, and few ventured there despite attempts by merchants to lure them by promising comfortable stores and quality goods at bargain prices. The wholesale business, which came to dominate State Street in the late 1860s and 1870s, turned the street into a commercial thoroughfare rather than a promenade for shoppers. Wholesaling was a man's world. The buyers were not the ultimate domestic consumers, but businessmen comfortable 'with the great profusion of activity they saw in this commercial district. It was ugly, smoky, and dirty and open vice and crime made it dangerous as well. These dangers along with the unpleasantness and inconveniences of the commercial street made shopping in the Loop a trying experience. Like the core of Paris before its transformation, Chicago's Loop was an impediment to the growth of consumption as an urban ideal.

With the expansion of retail business in the Loop, Chicago department stores began to offer more comforts and services to their clients to attract larger numbers of women customers. The courteous service and comfortable surroundings that had been the hallmark of merchants like Palmer, Leiter, and Field became even more important to the further development of mass retailing in Chicago. The introduction to the Loop of large stores devoted exclusively to retail sales enabled merchants to expand their services and create more comfortable surroundings. The ability to offer "everything for everybody, under one roof," as the Fair Store advertised itself, became an attraction to the public. Reception rooms where one could rest; reading rooms where writing desks, stationery and reading materials were available; public lavatories; art galleries; cafes and tearooms; and eventually supervised nurseries became standard features of department stores.

The visual impression that the stores created was as important as the goods and services they offered. Once inside, the din and dirt of the street gave way to the soothing and comforting ambience of luxury and elegance .

The Marshall Field retail store built in 1879 featured, for example, an enormous grand rotunda in its center opening through all six floors with ornately designed columns and rai lings supporting and enclosing each floor surrounding the rotunda. An immense skylight flooded the store with light, which made the brilliant white interior even more dazzling to the viewer. The Fair Store, another of the large State Street department stores, featured a grand amphitheater "with a great running fountain ornamented with vases, statuary, and flowers to refresh the vision."

Displays of merchandise also contributed to the special atmosphere of the department store. Separate departments were created for exotic items, like the oriental rugs in Mandel Brothers' Oriental Bazaar, or the Japanese wares in Carson Pirie Scott & Co. 's Art Decorative department. The use of electric lights for display purposes produced an enchanted fairyland atmosphere . Thus, department stores in Chicago developed as havens from the city streets, and by offering comfortable 39

Under One Roof

Above: Administration Building and Main Basin at night. The night illumination of the exposition was a novel and entertaining spectacle that made a deep impression on fairgoers.

Left: Fair visitors co111d leave their children at the nunery in the Children's Building for an afternoon while touring the fairgrounds . Gift of Mrs . Mae Olson.

40

Under One Roof and orderly surroundings, convenient services, and a chance to surround oneself in beauty and luxury, they were the agents whereby consumption became an increasingly important part of urban experience.

Although Chicago department stores sold similar goods and used the same kinds of mass retailing techniques as Parisian department stores, they had a much different role in the city. Like the theater and the hotel, the department store was a semi-public place, privately owned but open to the public.* But even more than other such semi-public institutions, department stores offered the public what the city could not, and all under one roof: comfort, order, convenience, luxury, beauty, and entertainment. Thus consumption came to represent a host of amenities and urban ideals that promised to make the city more livable.

Indeed, as public needs became increasingly synonymous with consumer demands, the department stores began to be seen as public servants. In the laissez-faire city of Chicago, the department store was one of the few exam pies of a planned and ordered environment, and more than any other city institution it offered the promise of what urban life might become.

By the time of the Columbian Exposition, mass retailing was well established in Chicago, and the department stores promoted themselves during the world's fair as if they were adjuncts to the event. Threatened by a growing financial panic, Chicago businesses saw the opportunity to profit from the crowds that would be coming to Chicago. Months before the fair opened, stores tried to capitalize on the large number of visitors who were expected in the city by offering to supply Chicago homes with all the items necessary to meet the needs of the visitors. Department stores also promoted products manufactured especially for the fair. Marshall Field & Co. announced a special sale of fine fabrics, "which are particularly adapted for wear at the exposition . . . " and offered a special assortment of shoes, as did Carson Pirie Scott & Co., who advertised theirs as '"fine shoes for walking.' The extra walking which will be involved during the world's fair .... " De artment stores extended their con*See Chicago History, Spring 1983 and Summer 1983.

veniences and amenities to out-of-town fair visitors both as a way to attract new patrons and as a public service. Stores like The Leader, Marshall Field's, the Fair Store, and Siegel, Cooper & Company invited the world 's fair visitor to take advantage of their reception and retiring rooms and offered free information about the fair and the city. Siegel, Cooper & Company introduced a special international reading room during the fair that featured the principal newspapers of all the major foreign nations and promised that all visitors would receive a "Hearty, Honest, Cordial welcome."

Marshall Field & Co. mixed the appeal of convenience with the attraction of sightseeing. In addition to courteous service, Field's retail store featured guides who spoke German, French , Spanish, and Italian to act as interpreters for foreigners making purchases and to give tours of the store and its facilities.

Chicago's department stores also drew attention to the similarities between their stores and the exposition. Special sales inaugurated during the fair were promoted as expositions of equal merit. One store boasted of the great time and expense it had devoted to an exhaustive search of Europe and America "to make the greatest collection of dress stuffs ever displayed in the greatest city of 1893 ... " and added as a final note, "we look for no finer collection of dress stuffs even in the quickly approaching world's exhibition." The Fair Store proudly pointed to the value of its special sale: "As the great exposition will leave a lasting impression on the minds of all, likewise shall we make this sale a memorable one."

Carson Pirie Scott & Co. advertised six new exhi bits every Monday in their State Street store's windows , and the Schlesinger and Mayer department store promised wonderful object lessons in theirs. Siegel, Cooper & Company was more direct in its comparisions to the world's fair, bragging that the procession of visitors south to the fair "seems to find in the Big Store Chicago's grandest exposition." The similarities between the exposition and the department store were indeed great: both were international in scope and both were great attractions to visitors. But they were most alike in their meticulous attention to the needs of the public. The World's Columbian Exposition 41

Under One Roof

Above: Int erior view of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building.

Organized around a central clock lower at I he intersection of the building's two major aisles, the exhibit space resembled a small city under one roof Photograph by C. D. Arnold, gift of Dr. Otto L. Schmidt.

Right : Fair exhibitors like Tiffany & Company spared no expense in creating elaborate displays of their merchandise.

42

Under One Roof was in fact the idea of the department store applied to a city scale.

Commercialism and the White City The "White City," as the Columbian Exposition was called, was the first world's fair to be compared to a city. The immensity of the fairgrounds by itself warranted this comparison, but the fair was also run like a separate municipality with its own street cleaning department, police and fire departments, electric light plant, and what corresponded to a mayor and board of aldermen. The cleanliness, orderliness, and beauty of the White City however were in sharp contrast to the dirt, confusion, and unsightliness of the host city. Above all it was a public city. Noted Universalist clergymanJohn Coleman Adams wrote: The city was orderly and convenient. The plotting of the grounds, the manner of their development, the placing of the buildings, the communicative avenue and canals and bridges, all exhibited a prevision, a plan, a management of things with reference to each other ... the mind was helped not hindered by the planning of the various paths. They seemed to be the details of an organization, not the mere units of an aggregation. The buildings were not a heap and huddle of walls and roofs. They were a noble sketch in architecture. The streets were not a tangle of thoroughfares representing individual preference or caprice; they were a system of avenues devised for the public's convenience.

[The New England Magazine, March 14, 1896]

The exposition made comfort, convenience, and protection a priority for the fairgrounds and provided many of the same conveniences and services first pioneered by the department store. The Bureau of Public Comfort provided three stations on the fairgrounds where visitors could rest, eat lunch, and purchase inexpensive refreshments. The bureau's .headquarters were located in the Terminal Station where cool waiting rooms, wicker easy chairs, toilet rooms, a piano, and attendants were available. ursing facilities were available in the Children's Building where for a small fee a trained nurse would care for a child while its parents saw the fair.

Nor were the basic amenities ignored. More than 20,000 linear feet of benches, capable of accommodating 50,000 people, were conveniently spread throughout the grounds for

the tired sightseers. An abundance of daily filtered water was available free to anyone who had paid the fifty-cent admission to the fair, and hygeia water was available at one cent a glass. Dining facilities were plentiful as well.

There were thirty-five restaurants on the grounds, and in each major building a lunch counter and special restaurant-all together more than 7,500 linear feet of lunch counter was provided. The fair management controlled the prices. Courteous service was also a feature of the fair. The Columbian Guards, the police force on the fairgrounds, were praised for their helpfulness in performing their duties "without any overofficiousness, brutality, and discourteousness that generally crops out in men dressed in official garments and authority at the same time." In contrast to Chicago's Loop, the White City was comfortable, convenient, and orderly.

Architecturally, the Columbian Exposition continued the French exposition style that emphasized lavish display, heavy ornamentation, and images ofluxury and prosperity. For the majority of visitors, the fairgrounds represented a novel spectacle rather than an aesthetic vision. Many descriptions of the fair pointed to the architectural unity of the exposition buildings as its most distinguishing feature with the Court of Honor the focal point.

But any suggestion of unity was overpowered by the architectural eclecticism of the buildings in the Court. The catalog of styles that each architect drew upon to individualize his work included neo-classical, Spanish-American, ancient Roman, Italian Renaissance, Venetian, Baroque, and Mannerism. Howe and Van Brunt's Electricity Building incorporated almost all of these styles.

Although the Court of Honor did not successfully achieve a vision of unity, neither did it dissolve into disharmony and chaos. Instead it reflected the merchant style of bombastic luxury and lavish splendor. Historian Henry Adams was not surprised that Chicago should choose this architectural style for the fair. "All trading cities had always shown trader's taste," he wrote of the fair buildings, "and, to the stern pursuit of religious faith, no art was thin ner than Venetian Gothic. All trader's tastes smelled of bric-a-brac .... " Architectural critic 43

Under One Roof Claude Bragdon wrote similarly: "All was simulacrum: the buildings, the statues, and the bridges were not of enduring stone but lath and plaster ... the crowds were composed not of free citizens of the place, but the slave .. . of the Aladdin's lamp of competitive commerce."

What made the Court of Honor so enthralling was not the unity of the architecture, but the variety of styles that together created an overpowering emotional impression .

The creation of a dream-like fairyland environment added to the fair's attraction as a novel spectacle. This for many was the real reason for coming. The fair was an amusement, "a great exterior show of staged effects ."

Writing three years after the fair, well-known architectural critic Montgomery Schuyler described its architecture as "holiday building" compared to "work-a-day building." Although the monochromatic white color scheme of the fair buildings helped to sustain the illusion of architectural unity and harmony, it was more important for giving the exposition its ethereal quality. Fairyland imagery, one of the most popular mass retailing devices used in the late nineteenth century, conjured up a land of enchantment free from want and suffering . The effect was even more pronounced at night. More than 100,000 incandescent bulbs, 5,000 arc lights, and 20,000 glow lights every night presented, according to Shepp 's Worlds Fair Photographed, a "fairy scene of inexpressionable splendor reminding one of the gorgeous descriptions in the Arabian ights when Harun [sic] Al Rascha was Caliph ."

It was the most extensive display of outdoor illumination the world had ever seen, surpassing the brilliant display at the Paris exposition ofl889. Although the Electricity Building contained many fascinating displays of the practical application of electricity to everyday life, it was the night illumination of the fairgrounds creating a novel entertaining spectacle that made the deepest impression on the public. Readers of Harper's Bazar learned what they stood to miss by not attending: One is never long at a loss for words in which to describe the marvels of the exposition. One may stumble and halt, to be sure, to take refuge in hyperbole, or content oneself with giving the ecstasy of the personal expression . Still, one can , with an

44

effort, give the unha ppy stay-at-home some idea of what he has missed at the fair. It is o nly when one comes to the wonderous e nchantment of the night illumination that one fail s for wa nt of prope r words . [September 9, 1893)

In addition to comfort, convenience, and entertainment, consumption defined the Chicago fair. "The Columbian Fair was large, immense, gigantic," wrote S. C. de Soissons of his Chicago visit in A Parisian in America, "but it was only a commercial fair, a larger shop than the others, that is all." The fair's Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building in particular fit de Soisson's description. It was Chicago's answer to Paris's Eiffel Tower (though it did not last as long), and what the building lacked in height it made up for in volum e . Called the "main building," it was the largest structure in the world at the time, and visitors were frequently reminded that three buildings the size of St. Peter's in Rome could fit inside. Its vast sixacre central hall , the greatest unencumbered area ever enclosed under one roof, was made possible by an ingeniously engineered system of huge steel arched trusses . Yet, the Manufactures and Liberals Arts Building was not merely an engineering feat ; there was a reason for its immense proportions. Indeed, more spectacular than the building itself were the exhibits displayed in its interior. The number and variety of manufactured articles displayed was staggering. More than 121 primary exhibit groups were further subdivided into 756 classes of goods , and within each class were hundreds of examples. Of the building's 6,000 exhibits,Japan alone had 2,089.

Organized around a central 135-foot-tall clock tower at the intersection of the two major aisles running through the building, the exhibit space resembled a small city under one roof: "Columbia Avenue, fifty feet wide, extends through the mammoth building longitudinally, and is crossed at right angles in the center by another thoroughfare of equal width. Parallel with these main roadways others are laid out in the usual rectangular form of a model city." The effect created was not unlike a city of stores with exotic structures and window displays to attract the public.

In their displays, exhibitors spared no expense. Many spent $20,000 to $30,000, and the white and gold Tiffany Pavilion was re-

Under One Roof

Above: The splendor of the White City wa.1 recalled in this thirteen foot reproduction ofDaniel Chester French's Republic, which stood on the main floor of New York's Siegel, Cooper & Company's department store.

Right: French's original sixtyjive-foot gilded statue, considered one of the crowning features of /he fair, overlooked /he exposition's Court of Honor. Gift of Mrs. Robert Alrich.

45

Under One Roof ported to have cost more than $100,000. A Chicago Tribune report quoted Director General Davis's estimate that the cost of all private exhibitors in the main building would equal the cost of the building. It is likely that many of the Chicago exhibitors turned for help with their displays to the Drapery Department of Mandel Brothers, who had advertised "designs , complete in detail . . . always ready for immediate execution" and boasted that "some of the most striking exhibits of the Fair are the results of our efforts."

None better illustrated the general lavishness than the exhibit of the American Radiator Company. Designed by architect Charles B. Atwood , who also designed the Fine Arts Building, the Peristyle, the Terminal Station, and several other notable structures on the fairgrounds, this exhibit illustrated the kind of elegant environment created to highlight something as prosaic as a radiator: Four rows of graceful Corinthian Columns formed the roof supports, the two interior rooms dividing the pavilion into two vestibules and an inner colonnade. The decorations were simple but effective and strictly in keeping with classic design. The entire pavilion was painted ivory with trimming of pure gold leaf. The ceiling was finished in a tint, varying from a creamy white LO a warm, rich pink, to harmonize with the satin paper on the walls. Delicate free-hand decoration , representing Corinthian festoons and wreaths oflaurel , adorned frieze and ceiling. The floor was of hardwood , adorned with numerous rich Turkish rugs. Furnishings strictly in keeping with the rich interior, and rare species of palms, completed the magnificent setting ... .[The Economist, January l, 1894)

Wares displayed in the main building continued the French practice of including price tags. Commenting on the remarkably low prices of ready-made clothing in the Belgian Pavilion, a Chicago Tribune report worried: "At the risk of leading Chicago people to break into the showcases it must be stated the prices pinned on those suits are ... different from the prices paid for clothing in this part of the world." The importance of the fair as an opportunity to sell was evident in the controversy that developed over the disposition of exhibited wares. To prevent the dismantling of exhibits while the fair was still in progress, exposition rules stated explicitly that exhibited articles sold during the fair could not be

46

delivered until after the close of the exposition. In a Chicago Tribune story, George Melaile from the French Pavilion expressed the view of many foreign exhibitors that the rule prohibiting delivery was harmful to sales: We are very much exercised about sales to visitors.

We have incurred very heavy expenses, and we are exceedingly anxious to recoup ourselves by the sale of some of our wares. Moreover our visitors are anxious to bu y .. .. we are allowed to sell anything we have provided we do not deliver it until the exposition is over. But that provision is a wet blanket on sales .. . the rules are designed ostensibly to prevent the weakening of the display by the removal of attractive exhibits. But we do not wish permission to sell the exhibits as we have an abundance of duplicates that are not on exhibition.

Before the end of the first month of the fair, rules were changed to allow exhibitors to sell and deliver their extra goods before the fair closed. And very likely many of these goods found their way to Chicago department stores. Mandel Brothers , for instance, purchased the complete exhibit of J.N. Richardson Sons & Owden's linens.

The model city that the exposition suggested did not end when the fair closed its doors in October 1893. A movement to beautify cities with planned public buildings and paces had been inspired by the White City and reached its peak in the first decade of the twentieth century. Plans made to rebuild sections of Washington. D.C., San Francisco, and Cleveland incorporated many of the ideas first introduced by the White City. In 1909, Daniel Burnham, Director of Works for the Columbian Exposition, submitted his Plan of Chicago, a vision of the city that was similar in design and ambition to Haussmann 's transformation of Paris during the Second Empire.

The most immediate impact of the White City's new urban vision, however, was on the department store. Marshall Field 's Annex Building, designed by Charles B. Atwood and completed three months after the exposition opened, is the earliest example of White City ideals transferred to an urban setting,* but a more complete realization came three years later in New York.

In September 1896, Chicago-based Siegel, Cooper & Company opened a new store in *See Chicago History, Fall and Winter 1982.

Under One Roof New York on Sixth Avenue between 18th and 19th streets. An immense seven-story structure complete with observatory tower and a searchlight visible ninety miles away, the building immediately became a landmark. With 738,000 feet of floor space-almost 17 acresSiegel, Cooper & Company's New York "Big Store" surpassed Whitely's of London and Paris's Bon Marche to become the largest department store in the world. It clearly embodied the Columbian Exposition's vision of a city that was beautiful, comfortable, and convenient. Described as "A City in Itself' that offered "everything that man, woman or child can eat, wear or use in their homes," the Big Store promised "more conveniences, more comforts, more privileges, more polite attention than any other store." Indeed, the store gathered together services and amenities that made it like an ideal city: a doctor's office, drug store, bank, information bureau, telegraph office, hair dressing parlors, conservatory, photograph gallery, nursery, bird and animal department, observation tower, and a New York post office branch.

The most telling evidence of the influence of the exposition was the thirteen-foot-tall gilded bronze replica of Daniel Chester French 's statue Republic (the original graced the Chicago exposition's Court of Honor) which stood on a marble base set in a pool of water in the center of the store's ground floor.

The pool was trimmed with palms, flowers, and ferns, and four fountains shot water above the height of the second floor. The effect was made more spectacular by the use of colored lights which constantly changed the tint of the water. Whether in Paris, Chicago, or ew York, the department store thus established itself as a powerful urban form. And in those cities and elsewhere it owed much and it gave much to the international exposition.

The World's Columbian Exposition itself represented only a grander expression of the French exposition style rather than a marked departure from the 1889 exposition in Paris. It was primarily a commercial event whose main goal was selling the idea of consumption to the public by creating elaborate images of luxury and prosperity and providing a comprehensive survey of the world's material wealth avail-

able for consumption. Both cities' expositions mirrored consumer revolutions, which gave increasing importance to selling products rather than merely producing them, to developing new techniques of mass retailing, and to creating new forms of entertainment.

Despite the similarities, however, the urban roles played by Chicago's and Paris's world's fairs were different. French expositions followed on an ambitious plan to transform nineteeth-century Paris into a safe, comfortable, and beautiful city. Indeed, the newly rebuilt city of Paris was the model for French world's fairs. Conversely, the Columbian Exposition was not inspired by the city of Chicago, but was a model for the hoped-for transformation of the city. It was an extension not of urban reality but of urban ideals of public comfort, safety, and convenience that first had been introduced in department stores. Thus the fair offered a vision of what urban life in Chicago might become. When Chicago city officials sent Edward T. Jeffery to study the exposition of 1889 as a model for their own fair, they also chose Paris as a model for Chicago.

For Further Reading One of the earliest and most helpful surveys of world's fairs is Patrick Geddes, Industrial Exhibitions and Modern Progress (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1877). A history of French national and international exhibitions is found in Richard D. Mandell, Paris 1900 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967). Two excellent histories of the transformation of Paris during the Second Empire are David H. Pinkney, Napoleon 11/ and the Rebuilding of Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958) and Anthony Sutcliffe, The Autumn of Central Paris (London: Edward Arnold, 1970). Charles Moraze, The Triumph of the Middle Classes (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1966) is an important study of the rise of bourgeois society and culture in Europe.

Two recent noteworthy books on French department stores are Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marchi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) and Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

Further information on the role of Chicago department stores during the fair can be found in the company archives of Marshall Field & Co. and Carson Pirie Scott & Co.; Robert W. Twyman, History of Marshall Field & Co., 1852-1906 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1954); and Lloyd Wendt and Herman Kogan, Give the Lady What She Wants' (Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1952).

47

Fashion and the Fair

By Jeanne Madeline Weimann

Fairs offer opportunities for the promotion of ideas as well as for the celebration of material wonders. In 1893, meetings and lectures, called "congresses," addressed many of the important social and moral issues of the day. The Congress of Women included sessions on education for women, womens legal status-and dress reform.

choice in dress , we must of course exclude all that is not in vogue," stated Godey's Lady's Magazine in May 1893. "Fashion must set her seal upon all, from a hairpin to a sealskin sacque. To choose something unfashionable would be to make oneself not pleasantly, but unpleasantl y conspicuous; it would be to deny an authority which is absolute; in many cases it would be to incur the risk of being considered eccentric, perhaps cranky." Later that same month, a group of ladies dared to be called "eccentri c" when they launched a revolt against th e fashions that were then in vogue. Their chief complaints concerned long gowns and layers of petticoats that put undue strain on one's shoulders, hips, and spine; long skirts that hampered free movement of legs and feet, inviting mishaps ; "scavenger skirts" that swept up germs and litter from walkways and harbored dampness on rainy days; and tight lacing demanded by fashionable wasp-waisted dresses that led to fainting spells, circulatory ills , and manifestations of "corset disease." Sponsored by the National Council of Women, the ladies behind this reform movement had chosen as their battleground the World 's Columbian Exposition, an ideal international showcase for their campaign.

The National Council of Women was a group that had grown out of an international women's assembly held in Washington , D.C., "wHEN WE SPEAK OF

Jeanne Madeline Weimann is author of The Fair Women (1981) and a free-lance writer.

48

Left: Spring street dress from 1886 with the then fa shionable bustle and long skirt. The tightly laced corset required by such waspwaisted dresses was thought to cause a variety of ailments. Right: The" American" costume, the National Council's answer to conventional street dress, consisted of a tailored hip-length jacket, short divided skirt, and leather leggings, called "gaiters."

in 1888, a meeting that had been called by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to mark the fortieth anniversary of the original woman's rights convention in Seneca Falls , New York. The council included a broad cross-section of groups working on such reforms as prohibition, the establishment of free kindergartens, the advancement of women stenographers, the founding of overseas missions, and of course votes for women.

Finding a common concern for such a diverse membership was not easy, but dress reform was supported by a majority of the women.

The council's first triennial meeting was held in Washington, D.C., on February 25, 1891, and three months later, at a meeting in Indianapolis, the council's leaders appointed a committee to deal with the issue of dress reform. The committee proposed a number of fashion innovations, and the members soon focused on the upcoming world's fair in Chicago as proving ground for their proposals.

Committee members argued that a woman could not hope to enjoy the exposition unless she wore c;omfortable clothing, and the cultural diversity of the fair's many visitors would create a "cosmopolitan atmosphere" for the introduction of such attire. In addition , the fair would feature a special Woman 's Building where exhibits by woman artists , scientists, inventors, educators, and explorers would highlight all aspects of the movement toward woman 's emancipation.

The five women th a t made up the committee were all well known in the dress reform

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49

Fashion and the Fair

Dr. Emily A. Bruce (above), a firm believer that "faulty dressing" caused serio11s illnesses in women, wore loose, lighlweight gowns without corsels. The diagram at left demonstra les the "harmful effects of tighl-lacing," despite claims in corset advertisernenls (below) that every woman wearing the undergarment co11ld achieve an elegant form wilhout "inconvenience and injurwus effects."

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50

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Fashion and the Fair arena. The chairwoman, Mrs. Frances E. Russell, had first taken up the cause thirty-six years earlier after reading a tract by Dr. Harriet N. Austen, an early dress reform advocate, and had since become perhaps the most avid historian in the field. Octavia Williams Bates of Detroit, a college graduate, still rem em be red how her clothing had handicapped her in wielding textbooks and getting through college in general: "The man student does not suffer from the danger to life and limb that lies lurking in every woman's dress."

Dr. Mary E. Emery was one of a growing number of women physicians who had traced many of her patient's ailments to Victorian dress, and she had begun publicizing her findings. Mrs. Frank Stuart Parker was president of the Chicago Society for the Promotion of Physical Culture and Correct Dress, which advocated the study of Grecian statues, the current idea of "women ideally clothed over ideal bodies." Lastly, there was the movement's leader, Annie Jenness Miller, owner and publisher from 1887 to 1898 of the Jenness Miller Monthly, a publication that featured dress reform propaganda, articles on physical education, and ads for women's underwear.

Mrs. Miller made public appearances all over the country wearing artistic gowns that exemplified her belief that past movements had failed because they did not strive for "picturesque and pleasing effects." But some dissidents like journalist Grace Greenwood felt that Mrs. Miller's gowns did not represent much of a change from traditional dress.

When Mrs. Jenness Miller appears in society, moving serene and symmetrical, in one of her exquisite costumes, it is as likely to beget discouragement as emulation, being something so peculiar and individual as only to seem fiued to her graceful figure, style and m,ovement. Still, her pretty inventions, though not suitable for all women, are hopeful new departures. Her charming gowns do not cramp the chest, or impound the heart, or trespass on the stomach. They begin ½'ell, I think, but keep oh too long. A little more brevity of skirts, dear madam! [Arena, November 1893]

For one year after the committee's inception in May 1891, committee members gathered signatures from influential women for a "Freedom and Common Sense Petition,"

which they presented at the National Council's meeting in Chicago on May 9 and 10, 1892: We whose names are signed below consent to give ou1¡ influence in favor of an improvement in women's dress which will allow her the full and healthful use of the organs of her body when walking or taking exercise. In signing this paper no one of us becomes responsible for the suggestion of any one else, nor do we promise to wear or to endorse any particular style of dress. We simply give our influence to help start a strong and healthy movement in favor of freedom and common sense in dress, leaving ourselves free to work for it as seems best to each one .

This rather timidly worded tract did not commit the signer to adopting the council's proposed costumes or any other reform outfit.

Thus many women who were reformers in principle rather than practice, such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, did not hesitate to sign. Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton had been among the first women in America to don bloomers. After several years of persecution, they reverted to conventional fashions because, as Miss Anthony wrote, "The attention of my audience was fixed upon my clothes instead of my words." Other signers were Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross; author Harriet Beecher Stowe, then eighty-one years old and ailing; and Frances E. Willard, president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, who felt the Victorian woman "has made of herself an hour glass, whose sands of life pass quickly by. She walked when she should have run, and sat when she should have walked. A spitted goose and a trussed turkey are her most appropriate emblems."

Despite a lukewarm reception, the council's petition did succeed in recruiting some younger, less eminent women to the cause. Laura Lee, a plucky, pretty Bostonian, had long been interested in dress improvement. When the National Council circulated its paper, she "was not only glad to sign it but was delighted to have an excuse and opportunity for wearing one of the costumes suggested by the pictures given in the 'Report of the Committee on Dress' published last spring."

The "Report" offered a choice of three outfits which women could pack in their bags for 51

Fashion and the Fair the Columbian Exposition. The first was the "Syrian" costume, which proved the most popular because of its association with earlier dress reform movements. The "Syrian" consisted of an Oriental trousers outfit, sashed at the waist, with no overskirt. Like the Turkish trousers that had been popular earlier, the "Syrian" had been inspired by clothing from the Middle East, where, in reverse of western convention, women wore pants as a badge of femininity. The first American to devise a "harem" costume was Elizabeth Stuart Miller, another signer of the council's petition. When Mrs. Miller visited her cousin, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in March 1851, she wore a skirt endingjust below the knees with long pantaloons which ballooned out very full and gathered tightly at the ankles. This piece was soon nicknamed the "bloomer" after Amelia Bloomer, who had publicized them in her feminist paper, the Lily.

The National Council's 1893 version of the "Syrian" was a bit more daring, and it soon presented a dilemma to Victorian women who wanted to wear cooler clothing but who were reluctant to reveal their legs. The committee's solution was gaiters, a sort of leather legging.

For more timid souls, the council offered the "modified Syrian," which ended above the ankle.

The council's two other suggestions were no less controversial. One option was the "American" costume, advocated as rainy day wear because its short skirt would not slosh in puddles. This rather soldierly affair consisted of a tailored hip-length jacket with roomy pockets and a full divided skirt with the mandatory gaiters. Most shocking was the council's third recommendation, the "Gymnasium" costume, a loose-fitting, knee-length exercise outfit adapted from those worn in physical education classes in East Coast women's colleges.

Whether a woman would actually wear this anywhere but in the privacy of her hotel room was a question. Suffragist Elizabeth Stone Blackwell, an advocate of the "Gymnasium" costume, tempered her enthusiasm with caution: "if it were necessary to go outdoors, a long apron could hide all peculiarities."

Fashion magazines like Harper's Bazar also called for dress reform at this time. The

52

Rachel Fosier A very caused a sensation when she appeared before the Congress of Women to read the National Committee's report on dress refonn dressed in her"Syrian" costume.

March 1893 issue carried an article titled "Dress for the Columbian Exposition: What Shall I Wear?" The answer was "A traveling dress by all means ... a smart gown of light-

Fashion and the Fair weight wool very simply made, with the skirt clearing the ground all around by one inch."

Also recommended was a walking dress of blue whipcord with a black satin vest and cuffs.

The skirt was four yards wide and escaped the floor by one inch, a length the Bazar was determined to push as a daring innovation. The ational Council, on the other hand, called for hems a foot to a foot and a half from the floor.

The council's costumes debuted in the April 1893 issue of the Review of Reviews. The journal was sympathetic, quoting chairwoman Frances Russell as saying that her committee was "not making a crusade in the interests of the odd and ugly." But the Chicago Tribune's headlines suggested that the council's recommendations were indeed strange: Chop Off the Skirts: Sacrifice Demanded by the National Woman's Council Curious Garments Recommended to Women for Wear During the World's Fair In Seeking After Sense the Council Plunges into Absurdity Costumes That o Sensible Woman Will Think of Adopting

The Tribune felt that the council's "Syrian" costume had only one thing in its favor: "It is so irremediably and appallingly ugly that no woman with proper regard for her duty towards man will yield to it." According to the newspaper, even council secretary Rachel Foster Avery, a poised and graceful lady, was "not able to come out of the ordeal of [ wearing the ¡'Syrian"] with flattering success."

The council's other costumes did not fare much better in the Tribune's regard. Annie Jenness Miller might well have regretted giving up her "picturesque and pleasing" reform outfits to aid the council's crusade after reading the newspaper's scathing personal attack: On a woman with a straight, lithe figure, [the "American" costume] might create a pleasant impression as seen advancing down the street. The rear view is less felicitous, and unless Mrs. Miller can invent means to present a more agreeable display of contour it is not likely that any woman will wish to profit by her suggestions. [Chicago Tribune, April 8, 1893]

Not surprisingly, the Tribune considered the

"Gymnasium" costume a "distinct shock": "Why a woman of taste and refinement should hop along the terraces at the Fair in a gymnasium suit is a mystery to the most reasoning individual." Despite its chauvinistic air toward the council and to women in general, the newspaper professed that its quibble was with the "impossible clothes that come with some show of authority from a woman's organization," not with the underlying principles of dress reform. The practical businesswoman would do better to wear a trim navy serge suit with many pockets and a hemline that just cleared the ground instead of the council's "positively objectionable and ill-advised" costumes that might backfire into a return to the old hoop skirts.

The National Council of Women remained undaunted. The following month, on May 15, the council launched its controversial costumes at the World's Congress of Representative Women. This week-long meeting opened the six-month World's Congress Auxiliary held in the new Art Institute building on Michigan and Adams. The women's congress included 330 scheduled speakers who spoke to 200,000 spectators on such topics as suffrage, social settlements, and working women.

Campbell's Illustrated Fair Weekly reported that "the days were so full, the women so numerous, and the subjects so many that it is hard to discriminate, but the ladies which attracted the most attention were those who not only advocate dress reform, but have donned it."

The National Council's session was scheduled for the morning of May 16. The audience, which swarmed about outside the hall long before the appointed hour, included dedicated disciples, older women interested in any movement to better the sex, and pretty young ladies in elaborate spring toilets, some who came to sneer and others wistfully expressing the desire to be freed from the bondages of their dress. Several men accompanied their wives to the meeting, but most of them looked rather uneasy. The Tribune, as was to be expected, pronounced the session the "joke of the day" and reported that "Women were standing on chairs and twisting their necks into bowknots in frantic attempts to see the apostles of modern bloomerism clad

53

Fashion and the Fair in the grotesque garments which their creed imposes on them."

A ripple of excitement swept across the assemblage as May Wright Sewall advanced to the podium to preside over the session. Mrs. Sewall, the National Council's president, had been flitting about the corridors all morning in her "American," and the audience was eager to inspect her "suspiciously divided" skirt.

Mrs. Sewall introduced the first speaker, Lucy Stone, a venerated suffragist who over the years had learned the wisdom of wearing a simple Quaker cap and gown. (This would be one of Stone's last speeches before her death at age seventy-five in October.) She had lectured, traveled, and reportedly even married in the bloomer, but had eventually abandoned it. In nostalgic tones, she told her audience why: The bloomer costume was the lightest, easiest, and cleanest dress I have ever worn. l adopted it when I was young and perhaps a trifle ignorant. l was disgusted with prevalent dress and I said, "When women see a sensible gown, they'll adopt it." They didn't adopt it, but I had a good time with it for a little while. I could go upstairs without stepping on myself and downstairs without being stepped on. I could walk in mud and come out unspotted. But it was a dreadful dress in one way. It was so conspicuous. The torment to the spirit was greater than the ease to the body, I found. Sol gave it up. But still I regard the bravery of those who were for it awhile as the beginning that has resulted in such a meeting as we are holding here today. [Chicago Tribune, May 17, 1893]

Rachel Foster Avery then read the report of the Committee on Dress Reform. Not everyone in the immense crowd could hear her, but they insisted on seeing her costume, the "Syrian," in which she had been pictured in a past issue of the Review of Reviews. "On the table!

On the table!" they shouted to Mrs. Avery, and she quickly obliged. She was joined on the table by Annie Jenness Miller, who was wearing her rainy day garb despite clear weather.

Commented the Tribune: she was "certainly not to blame in sighing for one or two mud splashes to justify her apparel, especially in the face of the fact that nothing else could." Mrs. Miller, however, appeared confident during her talk on the advantages of having many pockets.

Speaker Helen Gilbert expressed the belief

54

Hattie C. Flower was one of the [air's few women visitors to don a version of the National Council's controversial" Syrian" costume.

Fashion and the Fair that the best reforr1: outfits were those that did not draw attention to themselves; the Tribune rejoined that Mrs. Ecob must be laboring under the misconception that her short frock and blue velvet gaiters were inconspicuous.

The press had kinder words for speakers who wore something other than the council's recommendations. Mrs. Frances M. Steele , author of Beauty of Form and Grace of Vesture, wore a silver-gray bonnet and matching dress and was melodiously described as "a symphony in gray." Octavia Bates passed inspection with a "becoming bonnet" and "sensible gown of blue serge, long enough for the demands of conventionality." Miss Bates told her audience that ninety-five feminine ailments could be traced to tight lacing.

Madame Hanna Korany, Syrian ambassador to the fair's Woman's Building, was an impromptu addition to the program. Perhaps she had been recruited to take the edge off the hullabaloo which had erupted a week and a half before in the Turkish theater on the Midway Plaisance. The young American women working there as ticket agents and ushers had threatened to go on strike when told they would be required to wear bifurcated Oriental garments. The theater manager had stated in defense: "The costumes were modest and in my opinion certainly as desirable to wear as the garments worn by women of the West and they are much more comfortable and common sense." This argument must have appealed to advocates of the council's "Syrian." Madame Korany did not wear a bifurcated garment but instead wore a comfortable, corsetless sari of gold tissue gauze under a black jacket. She groped for words to relay the disappointing news that her countrywomen were abandoning the old costumes for more westernizec;I wear to be "a la mode." The session ended with the recital of a poem on dress reform, after which the audience made a mad scramble for the platform to examine more closely the "queer new clothes."

The women 's congress ended on May 21, but the ational Council of Women continued its crusade through the summer from its headquarters in the Organizations Room of the Woman's Building, which housed nearly sixty different women's groups. The council's booth

featured the dress reform petition , whi ch grew daily as more women added their names to the rolls. The council failed , however, to secure the endorsement of Bertha Honore Palmer, the Chicago society leader who was president of the fair's Board of Lady Managers. The only letter on dress reform to arrive at her office came from Mrs. H. G. Burton , founder of a dress reform club in San Diego, California. Mrs. Burton expressed the hope for a sensible dress- " nothing ultra or erratic"-but she feared the subject of reform was not "well agitated" in the papers , consisting only of "many harrowing items." She yearned after the impossible: "something we can wear as long as time shall last." Mrs. Burton made a personal appeal to Mrs. Palmer: I hope you c a n conscientiously favor [the movement] and will. As your influen ce will do so much for it. The fashions are making perfect slaves of womankind. If an ything can ever be done to relieve us of this curse , I think it must be done now.

Bertha Palmer no doubt handled this communique with her famous tact, but she continued to spend the summer in haute couture gowns from the Paris house of Worth. She was broadminded enough, however, to welcome several dress reform groups in the Woman's Building, including the Physical Culture and Correct Dress Society of Chicago, which protested fashions in which "over the course of twenty years, a woman assumes every shape under heaven except her own." The Society sponsored lectures such as "Fashion's Slaves" and "The Influence of Dress in the Physical Decadence of Women." Speakers included sculptor Harriet Hosmer, who regularly wore Zouave trousers in her Rome studio, and May French-Sheldon, the African explorer who packed rough traveling clothes along with silk ball gowns when she went on safari.

The Society lined the walls of its booth with pictures of gowns fitted to the proportions of the Venus de Milo, and thousands of women visited the booth and exhibited great interest.

Yet all of the gowns shown were of traditional length, which made them impractical for fairgoing. Also, many women were intimidated by the idea that they must assume the form of a Grecian statue before donning one of the

55

Fashion and the Fair graceful gowns. Their fears could have led these women to the conclusion that the council's costumes were their best choices. U nfortunately, the council neglected to display their costumes on mannequins at their booth, and staff members were reluctant to become martyrs to the cause by wearing the costumes all day. Thus fairgoers who missed the congresses did not see the costumes unless they happened upon someone wearing one on the fairgrounds. For example, Miss H.J. Westcott of the Boston Rational Dress Movement was one of four women who decided to tour the fair in the "Syrian." Prophecies of doom from conservative friends prompted them to pack their bags with an ample supply of traditional skirts for use in an emergency. According to Miss Westcott's testimony, the entourage toured the fair for two weeks with no glances other than those of "respectful interest." Sightseers who had grown weary of trudging about the fair holding up their skirts approached them time and again to inquire, "Where can I get the pattern?" Another Bostonian, Hattie C. Flower, had expected to brave the trip to Chicago alone in her "Syrian," but she met up with Miss Westcott's foursome on the train out, and they became "one big happy family." On arriving in Chicago, she found less companionship: It was a disappointment to note how small a percentage of women took advantage of the great opportunity offered by the Fair to break their bonds. I saw few dresses that did not touch or drag on steps and the oft-sprinkled paths unless ungracefully held aloft by their owners.

In an address to her temperance constituency at the fair's close, Frances E. Willard placed the blame for this state of affairs on women's clothing manufacturers' monetary greed: It is for this reason that bustles go out and come in and that bonnets change their periphery from the size of a coffee cup to that of a car wheel. It would be greatly to the advantage of women if they were permitted to pay a tax to the manufacturers, merchants, and modistes, and then go on and dress themselves comfortably to reason.

Miss Willard nevertheless felt that both the congresses and the Woman's Building had done much to awaken public awareness to 56

reform. Never had she seen so many dress reform societies led by so many women of standing; never had she seen so many papers written on the subject or so many women willing to wear the reform attire.

Even so, the council's costumes did not exactly become the season's rage. In the February 1894 Arena, the ational Council assessed the reasons for this. First, and most frustrating, had been the constant cry for "patterns!" when they had no patterns to offer. Eventually they did have for sale patterns for a modified "Syrian," otherwise named the "Boston Rational Dress," although the council members cautioned that "some of us who have tried the pattern hope for something still more rational before long. The attempt to make trousers look and behave like a skirt can never be very satisfactory."

There was a problem, too, in finding dressmakers who could be made to understand the peculiar needs of the reform-minded woman.

The leather gaiters, alas, proved uncomfortably hot during the broiling Chicago summer, and the National Council's own members found equally taxing another kind of "heat."

If women like May Wright Sewall and Susan B. Anthony could not bear the martyrdom of bloomerism, it was unlikely that more timorous women could. But the reforms the council stood for - shorter skirts, larger waists, doing away with corsets and petticoats-did eventually supplant the "barbarous" Victorian fashions.

For Further Reading Nineteenth-century fashion periodicals such as Codey's Lady's Magazine and Ha,per's Bazar are excellent sources for the study of Victorian dress. For more information on the issue of dress reform in the late nineteenth century, see "Dress Reform at the World's Fair," Review of Reviews (April 1893), and "Dress Reform: A Symposium," Arena (Boston, August 1892). A fuller account of the Women's Congress at the World's Columbian Exposition is available in The Congress of Women Held in the Woman's Building edited by Mary Kavanaugh Oldham Eagle (Chicago, 1893). On the Board of Lady Managers and the Woman's Building at the fair, see the Board's papers in the Manuscripts Collections of the Chicago Historical Society as well as Jeanne M. Weimann's The Fair Women (Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1981).

BooK REVIEWS OuT OF SIGHT, OuT OF MIND Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform, and the Environment, 1880-1980

by Martin V. Melosi Co llege Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1981. $22.58.

"Garbage in the Cities," Martin V. Melosi justly claims, "is the first historical treatment of its kind." On the whole it is a work very well done. It offers a nationwide overview of the municipal response to the prodigious rubbish generated by American urban life between 1880 and 1920. Already, the United States had become the most wasteful society on earth. As of 1905, for example, our cities discarded more garbage , more refuse, and more ashes than English or continental cities (U.S. cities, 860 pounds of mixed rubbish per capita annually; English cities, 450 pounds ; German cities, 319 pounds).

Melosi generally proceeds with good sense and breadth of view, building a strong base for subsequent scholarship, but two claims made at the outset are dubious. The nation, he says, did not discover the "ga rbage problem " until after 1880. This judgment discounts the fact that by that year, eighty-four per cent of American cities had already substituted human street sweepers for once commonplace scavenging pigs. Clearly, an earlier stage of"reform" had already passed. Also, the "budding environmental consciousness" attributed by Melosi to the post-1880 era had, in fact, already blossomed , much of it nurtured by English sanitary ideas imported into this country beginning in the 1840s.

Nonetheless, the year 1880 is a good starting point. By then American cities had achieved, at least in principle, the ability to flush out of their midsts all the waterborne wastes of households and rain-washed streets by means of engineered sewerage. This historic achievement effectively reduced the municipal waste problem to three tasks: cleaning streets, collecting garbage and other refuse, and disposing of everything collected. How American cities both perceived and solved these three tasks is the focus of this study. The problem of urban factory wastes , it should be noted , is all but ignored .

Melosi characterizes the dominant "philosophy" toward solid waste prior to 1900 as "out of sight, out of mind." Without question , public health advocates escalated their attacks on this attitude in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. As Melosi makes clear in a splendid chapter, their greatest breakthrough came in 1895-98 when New York City reformers placed a sanitary engineer, Col. George E. Waring, Jr. , in charge of their city's

street cleaning department. One of the era's most colorful figures, this "Apostle of Cleanliness" seized the opportunity, reorganized the department and its services along quasi-military lines, dressed his 1,450 street sweepers in white duck uniforms, and promoted this absurdity into a symbol of civic progress in America. Melosi upholds Waring's New York achievements as a watershed, dividing the " primitive and haphazard" practices of the nineteenth century from the oncoming era of "modern refuse management."

From 1900 to 1920, more and more cities consulted sanitary engineers. These new specialists, as champions of efficiency, centralized management, and statistical evaluation, battled the still pervasive legacy of lax waste handling. Meanwhile the civic reformers, many of them women, burst upon the scene extolling cleanliness as an aesthetic as well as civic virtue. ot content simply to pester city officials, the y mounted spectacular cleanup campaigns , promoting them as rituals of civic devotion, especially among children. To explain these developments, Melosi synthesizes the interpretations of other historians rather than advancing new insights into urban progressivism.

Assessing the results, Melosi concludes that the Progressive Era vision of a universally clean city fell well short of accomplishment. Nonetheless much change occurred. Street sweeping came of age as a full-fledged, increasingly routinized municipal function. Reliance upon private contractors to collect and dispose of garbage and refuse declined as local governments assumed these tasks. Trial-anderror technological experimentation abounded, but no historic breakthroughs resulted. Garbage incineration improved and spread, yet old-fashioned dumping persisted, partly because American cities, unlike those in Europe, often had far more cheap, undeveloped land available. In a host of ways deftly surveyed by Melosi, the nation's municipalities recognized solid waste as a complex problem requiring intelligent public management.

In a valuable closing chapter, Melosi details contemporary policy and practice, demonstrating that the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s, for all its novelty, often took up where turnof-the-century reformers had left off. Both the environmental consciousness and the technical and administrative tools developed prior to 1920 still shape much of today's solid waste management.

JON A. PETERSON QUEENS COLLEGE, CITY UNIVERSITY OF EW YORK

57

Book Revi_ews STEWARDS OF WEALTH

Noblesse Oblige: Charity and Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago, 1849-1929

by Kathleen D. McCarthy Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982. $20.00. to use language constructively, historians have an obligation to keep that language fresh and vivid by using words in a way which grows out of, rather than substitutes for, careful thought and observation. Kathleen D. McCarthy meets this obligation in her incisive study of charity and cultural philanthropy in Chicago, Noblesse Oblige.

Consider the title. In recent years American historians generally have used the term "noblesse oblige," as, for instance, William A. Williams does in his profile of Franklin D. Roosevelt in America in a Changing World, to suggest a one-way relationship.

By this usage, the well-born and prosperous express their concern for the poor in a paternal way which assumes that the privileged know what is best for the disadvantaged, and therefore can dictate with assurance the terms and nature of the assistance which they render. McCarthy demonstrates that a more complex sense of duty guided Chicagoans during the 1840s and 1850s. The era's "benevolent volunteers " considered their contributions of time and money an obligation which they owed to a society in which they had prospered and a "social glue" which unified the urban community despite such divisive forces as rapid growth, widening income gaps, and cultural differences resulting from immigration.

These antebellum "civic stewards" are the first of four generations discussed by McCarthy. She shows how changes in "social attitudes about private beneficence, the manner in which urban problems were perceived and communicated, and the available opportunities for individual social action" helped shape the response of these generations to three philanthropic concerns: family welfare, medical charities, and cultural institutions.

The second generation, "Gilded Age plutocrats," although wealthier and able to leave more conspicuous monuments, did less well in maintaining cohesion within a city increasingly segmented by income and ethnicity. Their concept of noblesse oblige emphasized donations of money more than time. During this period , as in others, women played a vital role in Chicago philanthropies, an outlet for intellectual and emotional energies held in check by a male-dominated society. Passage of the Illinois Married Women 's Property Act in 1861 gave them power over their own financial resources and helped patronesses in their quest for greater responsibilities, although the quest often took them away from the direct involvement with the poor characteristic of the previous generation .

The third generation, "progressive iconoclasts," criticized the second for losing touch with those LIKE ALL WHO WISH

58

they claimed to serve. They agreed with Methodist minister D. W. Pierce's judgment that ''any form of benevolence ... that removes us away from the unfortunate rather than identifying us more closely with them, or that draws attention to our own ease, gain, or accumulation ... is a charity which feeds our pride rather than hungry orphans." With notable exceptions such as Jane Addams, the progressives' remedy seldom was to reestablish direct ties with the poor, for philanthropists of this era were increasingly dependent on experts and social service professionals. With the urging of these professionals, they did promote neighborhood-based operations to reach the needy with a minimum of disruption of family life.

Their own social isolation and continued professionalization of social service and cultural institutions made the fourth generation "Jazz Age donors and dilettantes," "marginal participants" in causes which they lavishly funded. As barriers between "gold coast" and slum became more fo1¡midable, donors in the habit of 1¡elinquishing immense sums to professional fund raisers at glittering social functions came to equate "signing checks with noblesse oblige."

McCarthy provides a wealth of information on the history of Chicago, women and the family, American cultu1¡e, and urban growth. She offers new perspectives on the impact of events such as the 1871 fire, which hastened the transition to the second generation of philanthropists, and on institutions such as the Chicago Historical Society, which admitted the gracious and wealthy Mrs. J. Y. Scammon in 1867 after eleven years as an all-male bastion. To cover so many topics in less than 200 pages of text, McCarthy relies on tightly packed sentences such as the following ones, which describe problems facing Chicago by the 1890s: "slums exploded into an urban wilderness of tenements .... Epidemics traveled like wildfire through these human warehouses , piling up staggeringly high infant mortality rates .... Those who were poor, stayed poor, crushed by casualized labor, periodic unemployment, and the cyclical depressions of an industrializing economy."

In her brevity McCarthy sometimes neglects to explain and support questionable assertions, as when she writes that the carnage of the Civil War "blunted the nation's sensitivity to human suffering ." She also chooses not to discuss interpretations different from her own, although her footnotes direct readers to contrasting viewpoints.

To take one example, in her book on Culture and the City Helen Horowitz is less willing than McCarthy to credit the founders of the Art Institute with a desire to make art accessible "to everyone." Although McCarthy draws on an impressive array of primary and secondary materials in this book, she ignores some highly pertinent works, such as Richard Sennett's writings on paternalism, social insularity, and the Pullman community. Nonetheless, Noblesse

Book Reviews Oblige is a book which, by illuminating an important aspect of Chicago history, invites comparison to other places and times. Despite the contributions of the telephone (yet another issue discussed by McCarthy), keeping in touch with each other's needs is a skill not yet fully mastered by citizens of our urban nation.

GEORGE H. ROEDER,jR. SCHOOL OF THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

PRIVATE EYES, PUBLIC ORDER "The Eye That Never Sleeps": A History of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency

by Frank Morn Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. $17.50.

A GOOD SCHOLAR and a good detective have a great deal in common. Both know how to sift relevant facts from mounds of trivia and draw significant conclusions. Frank Morn has done just that in "The Eye That Never Sleeps," a book about the Pinkerton National Detective Agency and its enormous influence on the foundations of modern American criminology. ot only did the Pinkertons champion the principal tools of modern law enforcementnational and international police cooperation, collective pools of data on criminals, and criminal identification methods such as fingerprintingthey also contributed significantly to the formation of the Secret Service and the first Bureau of Investigation in the Justice Department.

"The Eye That Never Sleeps" is disguised as a monograph about this important crime detection organization, but it is in fact a serious study of the evolution of the American police-both public and private. At the same time the book is filled with details of nineteenth and early twentieth-century detection that will engage both the detective fiction buff and the student of the criminal justice system.

Morn's primary theme is the intimate relationship between nineteenth-century capitalism and the rise of city and national police organizations. He demonstrates the way that private detectives and public police forces provided necessary checks and balances to one another throughout the period of the capitalist "robber barons" and of American expansion westward. By the mid-nineteenth century, businessmen found a need for plainclothes detectives to protect them from embezzlement.

Private detectives, dubbed "operatives" by Allan Pinkerton (to emphasize their business-like organizational function), could more easily keep tabs on suspects. Conversely, the public required clearly id entifiable uniformed police to guard them against crime in the street and their homes: the uni-

form protected the citizen's civil rights by letting him know when he was being policed. Nineteenthcentury public opinion was that the plainclothes detective served as a spy against the individual on the behalf of larger interests, particularly industry.

Morn has been especially perceptive in his treatment of the relationship between the Pinkertons and big business. He reveals the irony in the connections between the Pinkertons, business, and national and local law enforcement organizations.

Allan Pinkerton was a liberal, a former Irish Chartist and a militant abolitionist. Yet his agency became the principal weapon against organized labor in the nineteenth century, playing a major part in both the Haymarket Riot and the Homestead strike.

If"The Eye That Never Sleeps" fails in any way it is that it neglects to tell us all we want to know about the personalities behind the Pinkerton agency. We are left without a real understanding of Allan Pinkerton, the Chartist who became a "Knight of Capitalism." The sketch of Allan's oldest son William is tantalizingly incomplete. We learn that he studied the detection techniques of the Surete in Paris and that he learned firsthand the ways of the American criminal-his friends included infamous "silk glove men," big-time crooks of the turn of the century.

Morn's sketch of William Pinkerton suggests a man of the world who was destined to become the heir to his father's legend, if not the Vidocq of America.

How did this interesting character ultimately lose out to his more sedate brother Robert in the power struggle for the future of the agency? Morn provides us with a cultural and historical answer to this question, not a biographical one. He shows how the public fear of spies cou pied with increasing support for unions gradually forced the agency to give up most of its undercover work (often anti-union work) and move into the protective services favored

by Robert Pinkerton.

This scholarly and detailed work provides context for both literary detection and modern criminal law. "The Eye That Never Sleeps" will introduce the reader to "yeggsmen" who "snuff drums" and to the first ''.jockey clubs." You'll meet Pinkerton operative Dashiel Hammett, who somehow managed to find in mundane assignments (like discharging a woman's maid) the inspiration for the characters of Sam Spade and the Continental Op. You'll also find that the "spies" who watch criminals are an elusive quarry themselves . Frank Morn's own form of detection has uncovered the important contributions of a legendary Chicago organization . Yet he lets slip in the book only one hint of the difficulties he must have encountered in researching this work: the Pinkerton's "practice, which exists to this day, of controlling publications of works on the agency."

Mr. Morn quite possibly could write an equally interesting monograph on his own experiences "shadowing" the trail of the Pinkerton agency.

CATHERINE MAMBRETTI

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AT THE SOCIETY This fall two photographic exhibitions highlight the past and present of one of Chicago's most distinctive pwces: Maxwell Street. Here Awn Teller describes its history and the work of two of the photographers who have recorded it.

BEFORE THE TURN OF THE C ENTURY, Maxwell Street was a dangerous place . In 1897, the Chicago Tribune called it the "wickedest spot in Chicago," and featured a woodcut of a dramatic shoot-out to illustrate its point. Raised wooden sidewalks provided underground passageways and hiding places for the Mortell-McGrath gang and other robbers and murderers who preyed on this poor and overcrowded area of recent immigrants. An increasing number of violent juvenile crimes was blamed on "rushing the can ," the common practice of fathers sending their children to the local saloon to fill the family beer bucket.

Short detours were common, as were stories of bands of drunk nine and ten-year-olds accosting strangers on the street.

The Maxwell Street police station , built in 1870, still stands watch over an area that now only comes to life on Sundays . Tens of thousands of people still converge on this roughly ten-square-block area, bordered by Roosevelt Road on the north , 15th Street on the south, Union on the east, and Morgan on the west. They come in search of something that shopping malls cannot duplicate. The sights, sounds, and smells are a throwback to another era-when buying and selling was an immediate interchange between two people and all was negotiable. These are all recalled in two exhibitions, "Maxwell Street: Early Views" and "Maxwell Street: The Photographs of Nathan Lerner and James Newberry," at the Chicago Historical Society this fall.

Alan Teller has taught photography at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago and Purdue University and is a partner in The Collected Image.

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Maxwell Street area, 1906. Street photographers produced millions of inexpensive tintype portraits. In 1906, more than fifteen studios operated near Halsted and 12th streets. Photograph by Charles R. Clark.

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At the Society The desperate life of early Maxwell Street, initially a German, Bohemian, and Irish area, grew out of poverty, overcrowding, and failed dreams. But not all the dreams failed. America was the land of freedom and opportunity for millions of struggling immigrants who, with meager possessions and wide eyes, streamed into New York and then made their way across the country. Times of poverty and political and religious repression made life in eastern Europe intolerable. A cholera epidemic and a famine in Poland and a pogrom in Odessa sent thousands to the new world.

A great many Jewish immigrants settled in the area of Chicago's Maxwell Street, the equivalent of New York's Lower East Side.

Approximately 50,000 arrived from 1880 to 1900, and the flow continued until the immigration restrictions of the 1920s. Most of them were from Russia, Poland, Romania, and Lithuania. The German Jews had come in smaller numbers some thirty years earlier and were generally more cosmopolitan, wealthier, more politically conservative, yet less religious than their eastern European coreligionists.

The laws of Orthodox Judaism encourage a tightly knit community. At its height, the Maxwell Street area boasted more than forty Orthodox synagogues, numerous Hebrew schools, baths, literary organizations, newspapers, Yiddish theaters, kosher meat and poultry markets, matzoh factories, and tailor shops. Pioneering social service agencies includingJane Addams's Hull House, the Chicago Hebrew Institute, the Jewish Manual Training School, the Maxwell Street Settlement, the Infant Welfare Society, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the Mandel Clinic, and the Chicago Maternity Center-operated in the area. There were only a few Jewish saloons (soda water being more popular), and the crime portrayed by the Tribune tended to come from the outside. It was a vibrant, exciting community, albeit a poor one.

The pushcart and the peddler's pack proved to be a good introduction to American ways for many recent immigrants. Little initial investment was needed; it provided the independence to set one's own hours and days according to religious custom; it provided ample opportunity to practice English; and most 62

important it offered the lure of success. Small quantities of notions, dry goods, fruits, or vegetables could be sold for pennies. Competition was extreme. For many, the pushcart was only an apprenticeship which led to a permanent establishment, or which provided the skills needed for other business ventures.

Maxwell Street was dotted with vendors of every description actively enticing customers.

The whole area was an old-world, open-air bazaar, where every imaginable product was offered at prices dependent upon reason and whim. Fresh fish, old clothes, used books, men grating horseradish or playing violins, potatoes, and shoes vied for attention. The tradition of haggling continues to this day, and even though the number of players is diminished, the search for bargains goes on.

There had always been many ethnic groups in the area (especially Greeks and Italians), but by 1900 the street was ninety per cent Jewish.

It drew customers of many nationalities from working-class neighborhoods. Greeks and Italians who lived a few blocks north of Roosevelt Road also were involved in local selling, principally as fruit and vegetable peddlers. They too had come to seek a new life, and while the reasons for their exodus from Europe were more economic than religious or political, their struggles to balance their old heritage with success in the new world bore many similarities to the Jewish experience.

In 1912, the city issued an ordinance officially establishing Maxwell Street as a public market and providing for the appointment of a "market master" to collect a daily ten-cent fee from each peddler. Apparenlly, there were too many wandering peddlers in too many different areas attempting to set up their temporary shops, and the growing city wanted a bit more control. Many Jews had begun to leave the area by this time, moving further west to the then more open spaces of Lawndale. But the character of Maxwell Street and its market had been set. Today the Jewish merchants remain in only a few shops in the Maxwell Street area, and few remain behind Sunday's street counters. The children of immigrants have gone into the professions and moved to the suburbs. A booth remodeling and clean-up program in the 1930s attempted a degree of

Maxwell Street area near j efferson and 12th streets, c. 1906. Hors es, wagons, wooden frame buildings, and immigrants of many nationalities crowded into this part of the city.

standardization, but its effects are negligible today. The Dan Ryan Expressway carved out a piece of the east side, and the University of Illinois is attacking from the north, having already demolished the heart of the Greek and Italian community. The land is close to the Loop and is getting valuable, a phenomenon which would have been unthinkable to the thousands who lived there in abject poverty for so many years. The ethnic make-up is more black and Latino than Jewish, Greek, or Italian. Semi-trailer trucks full of produce stock the stands which may now be staffed by college students on summer break. Recently, popular suburban flea markets have attracted would-be Maxwell Street bargain hunters, most of whom no longer live in the neighborhood. Urban renewal has left the area looking like a war zone, with burned-out buildings and vast, open rubble-filled lots visible only during the week when the Sunday crowds drift back to their usual lives and things quiet down.

But diminished or not, the variety, the colors, the smells, and the unexpected still reverberate throughout the Maxwell Street market. There are pig ear sandwiches, tacos, and blintzes. One of the best delis in the city has been there for years, run by a black man.

Broken radios, books, toilet seats, pots and pans (new and used), records, pictures, fresh produce, masking tape, hub caps, industrial solvents, and old clothes abound. There are still find to be had and deals to be made, espe-

cially in the quiet dark hours of the morning when the real collectors come out. There is also music. Since the 1940s when blacks began to frequent the area, both gospel and blues musicians have filled the air with remarkable sounds. Some of the most legendary figures in American folk music played to appreciative crowds and passed the hat on Maxwell Street.

Two or three bands still play regularly.

Maxwell Street has any number of meanings. It represents a no-overhead, easy entry into the economic system (both for the Jewish immigrant in the 1890s and the southern immigrant in the 1980s). It is a center for the redistribution of material, a place where the detritus of civilization can have yet another use. Most important, and the key to its survival, is that it answers certain personal needs of buyers and sellers. Where "no surprises" is the goal of many modern merchandisers, where packaging is neat and orderly, prices clearly marked, and the entire transaction safe, Maxwell Street provides a reminder of something else. There are always surprises, merchandise is not neatly packaged and arranged, prices depend on the weather or whim.

Photography has given us a way of recording at least some of these aspects of life that are threatened by the passage of time. But photographs of Maxwell Street raise the many issues involved in understanding and appreciating historical pictures, issues which call for an 63

At the Society examination of the subject, the photographer, the viewer, and the culture as a whole. Among its many uses, photography provides us with a sense of what people, places, or other times may have looked like. Our minds fill in what the silent, two-dimensional image leaves out, and that is both photography's joy and curse.

There is a fascination endemic to the viewing of historical pictures. The "truth" of an image is another matter entirely, one which is often irrelevant to our personal experience of the photograph. The bias of the photographer is ever present- picture making is, after all, a selection process, and what ends up inside the photographic frame has at least as much to do with the photographer as the subject. But despite this limitation , there is information in pictures: among other things, material objects in all their sizes, shapes, textures, and numbers; the forms, structures, and groupings of buildings, and the nature of settlement patterns, land use, or natural formations; methods of transportation; clothing styles

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(often useful in dating); price records of various items as evident in shop signs or advertisements; public and personal styles, relationships, and presentations of self. Sequences of activities also add to the accumulation of data. These "objective" records are, of course, only hints; they are silent artifacts, inviting interpretation. They can help put other information into context and perspective, and other information can add to their fuller interpretation. Technical limitations also affect the range of visual history available.

But "information," accurate or not, is only one aspect of our response to photographs. As abstractions from life, bearing an uncanny resemblance to life, images often function on an emotional level, calling forth memories, myths, or feelings. In addition to an individual interest in a particular time or place, we often have associations to specific places, objects, persons, or types, born out of personal experience or psychological need. If you grew up selling stockings on Maxwell Street, if your

At the Society knowledge of your grandfather came onl y through family stories or old photographs, you would respond quite differently to relevant images than would someone without these connections. Old photographs frequently function on a nostalgic level (the word "nostalgia" derives from the Greek root meaning "to return home") and that wistful sense of longing is a common response to pho tographs which are visual evidence of our mortality.

It is possible to achieve insight into our culture and ourselves by taking the time "to complete" these mostly anonymous pictures. This means a careful examination of all aspects of an image: the thing itself, detail, time, frame, vantage point, tone, space, texture, form , size, color, sharpness, foreground/background and other spatial relationships, and technical considerations. A careful examination of our own response to these photographs is also required. We perceive content through our eyes and attribute meaning based on our experiences, our needs, our personal interests, our

perceptual style, our cultural conditioning. If we recognize our own biases, we ca n understand far more than surface content in images.

An artist working with a camera is not necessarily after an historical record , although later his work may function on this level as well.

"Documentary" photographers always straddle the line between revealing themselves and discovering the essence of the situation into which they put themselves. The best work is of course a combination. The hand of the photographer is only hidden to those who do not know how to look. An examination of a body of work of a serious photographer reveals a consistency in style and approach, a focusing on certain ideas and themes, and an exploration of certain visual forms.

Nathan Lerner and James Newberry, the two contemporary photographers whose work is currently on display in the Maxwell Street exhibition at the Chicago Historical Society, represent distinct styles, interests, and approaches while photographing the same

Left: " The Uncommon Man," 14th Street near Maxwell Street, 1936. Right: " Chickens and Birds," Maxwell and Sangamon streets, c.

1936. Photographs by Nathan Lerner. Nathan Lerner's world is full of strange discoveries and captured moments offlight. Lincoln at the wheel, caged birds, children at play, or the faces of the unemployed convey a humanism which transcends simple picture-making for the historical record.

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At the Society

Above: "Women and Statue," Newberry Street between 14th and 15th streets, 1972. Below: " Hubcaps," Union Street north of Maxwell Street, c. 1966. Photographs by James Newberry. As we wander through James N ewberry's environment of hubcaps and madonnas, the juxtapositions, the textures, and the energy of the world around us become evident. The street for him is alive, and the photographic frame struggles lo contain it.

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Al the Soc1ety subject. Nathan Lerner, born in 1913 in Chicago, began to photograph Maxwell Street in 1935. He had studied painting at the Art Institute prior to that. Between 1937 and 1954 he was affiliated intermittently with the Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design (an outgrowth of the New Bauhaus) as a student, teacher, and administrator. Under Moholy-Nagy's encouragement, he produced remarkable and influential photographic studies of light. His most important painting studies were at the Jewish People's Institute on Chicago's West Side from 1935 to 1937. The JPI was the new name of the Chicago Hebrew Institute, a major Maxwell Street area center which followed the Jewish migration to Lawndale in 1927. Lerner's documentation is focused and clear; his vision as an artist and a human being shows us the surface appearance of the area, along with his deeper observations regarding people and their environment.

There is a quietness and gentleness to these images, no matter how desperate the surroundings. Lerner's sense of formal relationships and his technical mastery are evident, but it is the humanism of his work which produces its lyrical and transcendent quality.

It is not simply the passage of time, no matter how interesting, but the exploration of human response which gives these images meaning and consistency. Lerner shows us found objects or people with humor, irony, and sensitivity. He uses juxtapositions that make us look again and that hint at his own personality.

James Newberry, born in 1937 in Indianapolis, was a student at the Institute of Design almost twenty-five years after Moholy-Nagy's death. He has photographed Maxwell Street from 1963 to the present, producing thousands of images. They differ radically from Lerner's. Where Lerner's images are in the humanistic tradition of many of the Farm Security Administration photographers of the 1930s and 1940s (Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans.Jack Delano), Newberry's work springs from the social landscape orientation of the 1960s and 1970s (Gary Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Robert Frank). The form of Newberry's images is crucial-the relationships of elements within the frame and the use of the frame itself to start or stop reality are his true

subjects. Things enter and leave the photograph rapidly, highlighting the artificiality of photography's ability to stop time and making us aware of life's extensions beyond the frame.

As with Lerner, these are not posed photographs. Rather, the organization of space and subject matter commonly associated with "posing" occurs within each of these photographers as they scan the environment for suitable imagery. Newberry's work has less of the emotional orientation of Lerner's, but more of the energy of the street. We need both approaches to have even the vaguest understanding of Maxwell Street.

There are ethical questions raised by "street" photography. For the most part, neither photographer asked permission of his subjects, but was content to make personal images and move on. They did not hide, and in many cases it is clear that the people on the street are aware of their presence. If Lerner and Newberry had not photographed these things, the historical record obviously would be significantly poorer, but a camera around your neck is not a license to invade the privacy of your subjects. Casual photography annoys some individuals, and many of the vendors and street musicians on Maxwell Street today deeply resent being seen as camera subjects and not as people. Here the attitude of the photographer ultimately shows through whatever work is produced; it becomes evident in the form utilized, the expressions on people's faces, the feelings experienced by viewers.

Photographic truth is one mediated by an individual (the photographer), a mechanical device with built-in limitations (the camera), and a cultural framework for attributing meaning to imagery. Older photographs have the added problem of a surfacing exoticism associated with the passage of time; we are no longer sure what old things mean and so fill in with a contemporary understanding which may or may not be accurate. With a subject as complex as Maxwell Street, we need all the help we can get. The sustained perceptions of Nathan Lerner and James Newberry give us much. With a little work of their own, viewers can put the pieces together and gain entry into a rich and varied world filled with pushcarts, children, or the blues-Maxwell Street.

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Yesterday's City The immediacy of past events is sometimes best evoked by those who actually participated in them. Something of what the 1933 Century of Progress exposition and the people who made it were like is recaptured in the following two reports, each recorded at the time.

From 1930 to 1934, Barbara Haggard Matteson worked as assistant to Lenox Lohr, general manager of the 193 3 worl,d's fair, in both the f air's London and Chicago offices.

She kept a journal of her experiences. that Chicago's 1933 Century of Progress exposition was a success due primarily to its general manager, Lenox Lohr, whose untiring work and attention to detail was key to the planning of the exposition. A major in the U.S. Army's Corps of Engineers during World War I, Lohr was appointed as general manager of the fair in 1930. I was privileged to be closely associated with Major Lohr while he worked on the exposition, and I found him to be one of the friendliest and most interesting men I ever met. To work for him was a great pleasure. While he was a strict disciplinarian, he was quick to praise work well done.

Despite the hard times of the Depression, plans for the 1933 world's fair were well underway by October 1930 when I met Major Lohr. At that time he made a visit to the exposition's London office, which was headed

by Sir Henry Cole, chief general adviser to expositions all over the world. Sir Henry's vast experience with world's fairs and his knowledge of diplomatic circles made him invaluable to Major Lohr in his dealings with government officials in various countries. The purpose of Lohr's visit was to see that the workings of the London office coincided as fully as possible with those in Chicago.

FEW PEOPLE REALIZE

Barbara Haggard Matteson is a writer and poet and lives in Sussex, England. Stanley Gwynn retired as qssociate director of the University of Chicago library in 1974.

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On his first visit to the London office, where I was employed, Major Lohr found the staff drinking tea while they worked. "What on earth are they doing?" he asked.

"Just an old English custom," replied Sir Henry Cole. "We shall have ours in my office presently."

Lohr turned to him quickly, and breaking into a grin said, ''I'll take mine right here. Maybe I can find out how the wheels go round in this office, O.K.?"

This was the beginning of an interesting relationship between Major Lohr and the staff of the exposition's London office.

Shortly after I met Lohr, he asked Sir Henry to bring me along as secretary, interpreter, and general factotum on a three-week tour of Europe they planned to take with several other exposition officials. The primary purpose of the tour was to cover the sites of past and present European expositions in seven countries. During the trip, Major Lohr made it his job to learn what type of exhibits or entertainments were the most popular with exposition crowds. He mingled with the people and noted any personal reactions to the exhibits, and he tried all the rides on the "midways," making notes on the popularity and potential danger of each. Lohr also inspected all types of transport at each fair, including buses and small-gauge track trains, to search out all advantages and disadvantages. He made a careful survey of the height and width of treads on public stairways, the types of surfaces used on the roads and walkways inside and outside the buildings, and the slope of all ramps. With a folding ruler and paper and pencil, Lohr made careful calculations and dictated notes and cables to forward to Chi-

cago. Lohr was determined that Chicago should have the very best in entertainment, comfort, and safety for its visitors in 1933.

Most important, Lohr examined the construction materials at each fair, tapping walls and pillars with his pencil and listening carefully to the sounds each made . After one such test he turned to me and said, "Make a note of this. Plaster of Paris on wire. Cable Chicago about this. Hold everything until they get my report. More economical than permanent stone buildings, and just as effective visually."

This was Lohr at work, brief and to the point.

At this time, more than forty years ago, there was no airmail across the Atlantic. Letters between Europe and Chicago took some weeks to arrive, and cables were costly but essential in view of the urgency needed. Lohr was an expert at cable communication, making every word count.

Another important goal of the tour was the selling of space at the Chicago fair to European nations. This was not an easy task as it involved selling space in buildings that had not yet been constructed. Indeed, there were no final plans for many of the buildings. Another drawback was Chicago's distance from Europe -more than 4,000 miles-and it was virtually unknown to Europeans other than as a home for gangsters and stockyards. Given Chicago's reputation, some government officials were not even interested in talking to Lohr about the exposition, but the major was undaunted in his efforts to meet with them. Once, in Copenhagen, we waited all day for a telephone call to confirm an appointment with one official. Sir Henry had tried several times to see the man with no success. Now we had to catch a train and could wait no longer. Major Lohr turned to me and said, "You go get that date with the guy!"

I immediately took a taxi and presented myself at the official's office. He had no idea why I was calling on him, but he shook my hand politely and inquired what he could do for me.

I replied that if he would let me use his phone, I would call my boss at the hotel. Still puzzled, he graciously consented. As I sat in the office holding the fort, as it were, Sir Henry and Major Lohr rushed over to see the official.

During the entire European tour Major

Lohr was quite indefatigable. We were all kept on our toes trying to keep up with him. One of the most unforgettable days I spent following him and taking notes was in Munich, Germany, at the Deutsches Museum. We arrived there just as it opened and did not leave until closing time about eight hours later. During that time we walked what seemed like many miles on the hard stone floors, studying in detail as many exhibits as possible . They had a push-button system for animating many of the exhibits, and Lohr, who was fascinated with machinery of any kind, spent a good deal of the time pressing buttons and explaining the exhibits to me. "Wouldn't it be something ifwe had animated exhibits of this type in the Rosenwald Museum [now the Museum of Science and Industry] in Chicago?" he said. "I certainly would like to run a show like that over there. Think of the fun the crowds could have, and how much the kids could learn too, watching all these things happen before their eyes!"

This meant very little to me, as I had never been to Chicago, but Major Lohr was to remedy this situation for me just a few days after we returned to London. I was told to get my passport ready as we were to leave in two days time. I was being sent to Chicago for several months to form a closer liaison between the two offices. My stay there lasted five months, from November 1, 1930, to the end of March 1931. I worked in the Administration Building Exhibits Department sorting out and translating all my notes from the European tour.

Some years later, Lenox Lohr became president of the Museum of Science and Industry.

You seldom found him in his office there, but if you wandered around the museum you might find him standing in a crowd of people watching their reactions to one of the latest exhibits or showing special visiting dignitaries around some of his favorite sections, or just checking up on the installation of a new exhibit.

Chicago suffered the loss of a fine and dedicated man when Major Lenox R. Lohr died in 1968, many years after the Century of Progress exposition closed. Throughout the latter years of his life, Major Lohr must have felt a deep sense of satisfaction in knowing that the

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Yesterday's City world's fair that he had worked so hard to bring about had attracted some 18 million more visitors than any American exposition up to that time. Many of the people who worked under him during the fair followed him to the Museum of Science and Industry, where the germ of an idea born at Munich's Deutsches Museum finally became reality.

Stanley Gwynn, then a junior at Northwestern University, spent the summer of 1933 as a chair guide at the Century of Progress.

Thai November he set down his reflections and submitted them as an assig;nment for a course in advanced composition. r WAS ONE of eight hundred college boys who were drafted for roller chair service at the 1933 A Century of Progress Exposition. We were hired from universities aJI over the country, and we were told that we would make from twenty to thirty dollars a week. Later we would be able to use our uniforms (which we had to buy from Mandel Brothers for $11.80 each) for Sunday suits. We were also told that pushing a chair would be the experience of a lifetime and that the contacts we made at the fair would help us throughout our days in this world. The net result of these promises is that the average honest chair guide made from twelve to eighteen dollars a week; the uniforms hardly held together, and all possibilities of Sunday use evaporated before our first week of work had passed; and the contacts we made at the fair will be useful to us.

In spite of pay considerably lower than we expected, the value of the experience is inestimable. This value is not necessarily of a direct and immediately forthcoming kind, such as job offers from pleased passengers, but it is in a less tangible form of the knowledge of human nature gained from contacts with many personalities.

All of my passengers asked these four questions, and they generally asked them in this order: "Are you really all college boys?"

"How do you get paid?"

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" How in the world do you manage to keep walking all day long?"

"How in the world do you stand the monotony?"

It would perhaps be logical and convenient to answer the questions in just that order. First, about ninety-five per cent of us were college men or men already accepted as freshmen by a university. The other five per cent were men and boys having some connection with the roller chair concessionaires. After the second week in September, when most of the college men had quit to resume their studies, the ranks were filled with high school graduates and various of the unemployed.

Secondly, we were paid on a commission basis - thirty cents on the dollar. The chairs cost passengers a dollar an hour. If he was pushed an hour, his guide got thirty cents of the dollar plus the tip , if any. Under such an arrangement, the checks ran from three to eight dollars weekly, and the rest of the guide's twelve to eighteen dollars was in tips. Most of the guides were open and admitted chiselers.

Antagonistic toward the chair concession for charging them too much for their uniforms and for putting on duty entirely too many guides, most of them displayed no hesitation in gyping the company whenever and wherever possible.

Occasionally a guide would be caught and fired , but unless one got too ambitious or too careless there was little danger of that. One time a guide turned in his card with nothing on it, but when he admitted that he had earned two dollars in tips that day, he was fired. I was only moderately dishonest, so I did not make as much as many of the fellows , but my tips were good. This brought my earnings well above the average.

As for the third question, " How do you manage to keep walking all day long?", the answer is, simply, that we got used to it. Every night for the first week of the fair I literally hobbled home. It seemed as if I would never and could never get to the el station. But after the seventh day my feet never became tired again. We took to wearing large, medium heavy shoes and woolen socks, and this precaution, coupled with my walking correctly, insured that my feet were in absolutely perfect

Yesterdtrv's City

Visitors to Chicago's Century of Progress exposition could hire a uniformed attendant and roller chair to tour the 424-acrefairgrounds .

shape at the close of the fair.

And now for the fourth question, "How do you stand the monotony?" I was often tempted and sometimes did answer this question by saying, "You, my passenger, are making my job interesting. No job with so many contacts and such a diversity of people could be monotonous." And then I would proceed to mention to my passenger some of the interesting things in our work.

Experiences with inebriated people formed a large part of the amusing incidents, and after three months of observing their actions, I can hereby affirm that a drunken person 's first reaction to a roller chair is the desire to ride in one, and the second is the desire to push one . One night I had a drunk who weighed at least 250 pounds . We reached the bottom of the steep incline at the foot of the Sixteenth Street Bridge and I gathered my strength for the ascent. Suddenly my passenger shouted out: "Hell! that's too damn steep. Lemme push you up ."

I didn 't say a word. He got out, I got in, and

up we went, much to the onlookers' delight and my fear that he would let go of the chair.

That push did him good, too, and I think he realized what a job I had pushing him around.

At least he gave me an extra large tip.

One night a drunk came out of the "Streets of Paris" bistro. He was making feeble but recognizably happy gestures with his arms, and at once five empty roller chairs bore down upon him. After dreamily surveying them, and after attentively listening to the sales talks of the respective guides, he hired all five of them.

He climbed into one, and surrounded by the four empty chairs, moved regally down the Midway.

A second source of amusement was the questions asked by passengers and other visitors requesting information. One day I was leaning on the lagoon rail watching the fountains in the South Lagoon. A woman came up to me and asked, "Those things are fire boats, aren 't they?"

Another woman , who evidently had a morbid notion of the efficacy of modern surgery, instructed her guide co take her to see the 71

Yesterday's City "medical tortures." He made a wild guess and delivered her to the medieval torture show.

He was right.

One of the guides had a woman passenger who wanted to see the live babies in the infant incubators. Most of these babies were about three weeks old, and none of them weighed more than three pounds. The woman went into the incubator room but came out in a very few minutes and indignantly got into her chair.

"They're fakes!" she snapped. The guide couldn't let that pass, but when he started to correct her, she interrupted him.

"They are fakes. They had the same babies in the Saint Louis Exposition in 1904."

The planetarium also bewildered some people. I had heard of a woman who asked what kind of plants they grew in it, but I didn't believe that story. One day, however, I had a New Yorker, and I suggested that he really ought to take in a lecture at the planetarium.

"We got one of those in Central Park," he said. "All kinds of flowers and everything."

Our frequent clashes with concessionaires provided us with another manner of interest and entertainment. Most of the shows, rides, and "dine and dance" establishments admitted chair guides free of charge. Some of them, like The Pirate Ship and Ripley's Odditorium welcomed us with open arms. They knew the volume of business we could bring them. On the other hand, some of the cheaper shows refused to let us in. On such occasions we merely became racketeers and threatened a boycott.

One night four of us left passengers at a freak show. None of us had seen the show, and we all wanted to learn what was presented in order to inform future passengers. The ticket-taker, however, refused to admit us. I was feeling stubborn and determined to see the thing through. I asked to see the boss and was told, "He's a little man with a brown suit and glasses." I found a little man with a brown suit and glasses and accosted him, but he wasn't the boss . The boss, he told me, was a little man with a brown suit and glasses. I found four little men with brown suits and glasses, but none of them was the boss. When I finally did get ahold of him, he was a big man in a blue suit with no glasses.

72

"How about getting in here?" I said. "We brought you four customers." When he refused to let us in, I said, "You know, we can keep away a lot of your business. From now on we talk your outfit down." I was almost sure I had him, and I was right. In a few minutes he came over to where we were waiting for our passengers and told us in a nasty tone that we could enter his establishment.

No arguments could convince the manager of the Old Plantation Show that chair guides should be admitted free to his concession, and he couldn't be shaken from his stand. One day, however, there came one of those infrequent cloudbursts that marred the otherwise perfect weather during the fair. Another chair guide and myself, along with a dozen people, were marooned in the entrance to the "Battle of Gettysburg" show. Also present was our enemy the manager, fretting because he wanted to get back to his own show but loath to soak his resplendent attire. He chewed up three cigars during the course of the downpour. When the rain finally ceased, there was a lake about eight feet wide blocking our exit. I pushed a small platform into the water, pulled my roller chair in front of it and the other guide's chair in front of mine. We thus formed a rather shaky bridge across which those marooned could leave. Most of them did use our bridge, and most of them tipped us. But when the hostile manager wished to cross, we pulled our chairs away and left him stranded.

I heard that he chewed up two more cigars before he finally got away.

The real value gained from these experiences is, as I have said, intangible. It is hard to set down on paper just what we learned of human nature. I can say, however, that we all could tell, almost before a person got into a chair, what kind of a line to use with him, and most of us could spot a passenger's occupation within a few minutes. We could distinguish among lawyers, engineers, executives, authors, or men of any occupation with almost unfailing accuracy. But I could fill a book with accounts of the interesting people I met at the fair. I promised to give a cross-section of a chair guide's experiences, and having done so, I will cease writing.

It was good fun, that fair.

Pmtn by Sando, Jui the SkI Ride. trademark of Chicago\ 1931-3-1 A Centurv of Progress Expo.11/wn. Fmm the exhibition, "A CenlW)' uf Progre.1.1," 11/ tft,, Sont'ly through lJffembrr 31, 1983.