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Chicago's Grand Midway
A Walk around the World at the Columbian Exposition
By Norman Bolotin, Christine Laing UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Norman P. Bolotin and Christine A. Laing
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-08242-9
CHAPTER 1
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Creating the World's First Midway
The first world's fair was held in London in 1851, but the history of exhibitions and expositions is far longer than the short span of time between that first world's fair and the World's Columbian Exposition. The centuries of local and regional fairs that preceded the first world's fair were relevant to it in an evolutionary sense, but once they morphed into actual "world's" fairs, the content and scope grew exponentially. By the time the World's Columbian Exposition was held, the acceleration of change and evolution was dramatic.
Fairs have been held to introduce societies to new inventions and new interpretations of civilization. As cities and countries grew, industry evolved, and societies changed, fairs' presentations were a direct result of that societal progress and also of mankind's unceasing desire to capture the past and project the future.
The World's Columbian Exposition owes its existence, at least in the abstract, to literal lawn parties of medieval English royalty. Those earliest fairs a thousand years ago often were held under the auspices of the English Crown, as a gift to paupers, farmers, and members of uneducated classes. They celebrated a military victory or helped restore morale on the heels of a drought or military defeat. The Crown bestowed its blessing on the event for its illiterate class, but the much smaller monarchical upper class enjoyed the spoils. None of the "unwashed" class attending the brief celebrations complained of inequity because for a single moment in their lives, the peasants enjoyed a break in the monotony and struggles of their meager existence. They could be physically close to royalty and overlords without fearing malevolence.
For the royalty and its court, there were social events — banquets and balls and the sporting combat of swordsmen and jousters — along with minstrels, jugglers, and magicians. It was the closest the upper and lower classes ever came to commingling. For a very brief time, all the English men, women, and children were ersatz equals.
These nameless fairs, visual benchmarks of the medieval era, have been backdrops of innumerable films about the period. They showed the different classes and represented the progress of people and civilization. Since 1851, world's fairs likewise have symbolized humanity's best foot forward.
It's not surprising that as Western Europe evolved, so did fairs and exhibitions. As literacy increased, so did the frequency of fairs. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, major European cities held exhibitions and expositions worthy of historical note, although closer in size to those of a thousand years earlier than to those of a few decades later. The Industrial Revolution saw the advent of industrial fairs, bringing the era's technological advancements to the public. London, Liverpool, Brussels, and Paris all sponsored events that drew attendance from across national borders.
These were the forebears of the World's Columbian Exposition. The planning commissions of each fair studied the successes and failures of those immediately preceding it.
Queen Victoria gave us a name for the era of her sixty-one years on the throne. It was her consort, Prince Albert, who took fairs to an entirely new level in both content and size with the first exposition dubbed a "world's" fair. Albert was intimately involved in social and educational activities in England after he and Victoria married. Victoria often ceded political and royal tasks to him. The English people were initially wary of Victoria's German cousin when they married, but he rapidly won over the country with his dedication to Victoria and to England, as well as to its growth and development.
As nineteenth-century fairs blossomed, many were international and could easily have launched the term "worlds' fair." Between 1830 and 1850 Paris hosted five expositions/fairs; Turin, Italy, hosted eight; and Great Britain was the site of two. The only reason none were called "world's fairs" was simply that no one had coined the phrase. Albert was responsible for the moniker and the exposition that became the line of demarcation between centuries of small and local fairs and the age of world's fairs.
Prince Albert oversaw the planning, management, and construction of the 1851 fair in London's Hyde Park. The exposition was larger than any previous fair by a prodigious magnitude.
Albert's goal was to expand the reach of England's industrial, commercial, and transportation industries — and demonstrate their superiority. The plan called for the venue to be an exhibition in itself. The first Crystal Palace was all that, and more.
The architectural design and construction of the cast-iron and plate-glass Crystal Palace was unique at the time. Most fairs and expositions had been held in existing facilities or in new ones similar to existing structures. The Crystal Palace was 1,848 feet long and 456 feet wide and used 1.25 million square feet of glass. Albert not only invited individuals and businesses from all over Europe, unlike the status quo of industrial expositions focused solely on western European nations, but he also courted business and political leaders of two geographically distant countries, India and the United States. Relatively few countries had recognized the growth and economic potential of the United States, with much of England still regarding the country as little more than a former colony. Dealing with America and American business still required a long voyage across the Atlantic, and for U.S. companies to exhibit at or attend the 1851 world's fair in London required a massive commitment of time and money.
The exposition was formally called the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations. A newspaper writer in England dubbed the new fair "Prince Albert's World's Fair." From that point forward the name was a part of our vocabulary. All fairs have been inexorably linked to the evolution of our societies and their arts and industries, but Prince Albert made arguably the greatest single leap forward of any fair before or after.
Prince Albert's ambitious plan for filling the Crystal Palace called for fourteen thousand exhibitors and some one hundred thousand objects on display. It was a huge success by every measure, from the structure to the breadth of participants. Despite the fact that travel of any distance was slow and difficult, the attendance at the first world's fair was a rather astounding six million.
Since 1851, more than two hundred international expositions, exhibits, fairs, and world's fairs have been held. Some were of the magnitude of the World's Columbian Exposition, and some were smaller in focus or created with dramatically different expectations — in attendance and revenue. Success, financial and otherwise, has come with attendance of less than one million and more than fifty million. Other fairs have drawn relatively large attendance numbers but, for a variety of reasons, failed to be profitable.
The World's Columbian Exposition
The World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 was the first world's fair to separate itself into two distinct components, but it took management of the fair virtually the entire planning period to decide just how to present the world's first midway.
The Midway Plaisance was to be a part of the fairgrounds from the earliest days of planning, as the mile-long boulevard perpendicular to the more than six-hundred-acre main site seemed a logical supplement to the main grounds. How to incorporate it was a far more difficult decision.
The Grand Buildings, expansive waterways, foreign and state buildings, and specialty structures forming the White City progressed at breakneck speed. The Midway, on the other hand, was slow to coalesce.
The formal planning process began just four years before the target opening when Congress passed "A Bill To Provide for a Permanent Exposition of the Three Americas at the National capital in Honor of the Four Hundredth Anniversary of the Discovery of America."
At the same time, construction of the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, the largest world's fair ever held, was under way. The City of Lights had already hosted three of the great world's fairs of the century in 1855, 1867, and 1878. The fourth was the most dramatic, featuring construction of the Eiffel Tower. U.S. Congressional leaders were well aware of the 1889 Paris exposition when they began to debate the issue of a major exposition in the United States for 1892.
Four cities submitted serious proposals — St. Louis, New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC. The debates and proposals were protracted and antagonistic. Washington and St. Louis were eliminated relatively quickly in the process, leaving an unexpected and anomalous head-to-head competition between favored New York and "upstart" Chicago.
New York leaders cited their vast experience with major events, including the country's first world's fair in 1853 (although it received little recognition outside the country), its status as the largest city in the country in every census taken, and its major port facilities serving Europe, the eastern seaboard, and the West. It also had enormous private capital resources.
Chicago had a long list of attributes that ultimately made it the better choice for the fair site. It had a thriving business community and was blessed with two thousand acres of parks, including expansive areas of Lake Michigan waterfront. Nearly half the acreage was in Jackson and Washington Parks, with the Midway Plaisance between. Further, twenty-four railroads had terminals in Chicago, creating an elaborate and highly efficient network for transporting people and freight. Exhibitors and vendors would present massive freight requirements in both volume and speed, and the Chicago delegation cited its capability to deliver both — as well as millions of visitors.
Reportedly the city's steam railroads, steamboats, and excursion boats combined could carry more than two million passengers per eighteen-hour day.
Chicago also made its bid on the basis of its central location, wealth, and enterprises, as well as its status as one of the fastest-growing cities in the world, both before and after the Great Fire of 1871. In the census of 1870, Chicago was the fifth largest city in the United States with a population of 298,977, compared to New York's 942,292. One would have expected a decline in Chicago's population with the devastation of the fire, yet the census of 1880 showed that Chicago had grown to half a million — while New York became the first city in the country with more than a million residents (1.2 million). By 1890, as Congress was debating the concept and scope of the world's fair as well as its location, Chicago had become the second largest city in the United States with a population of 1.1 million compared to New York's 1.5 million. The size of the host city had effectively been eliminated as a factor in the decision. While Chicago was not on the ocean, it was adjacent to 22,000-square-mile Lake Michigan, and fair proponents described their plans to construct the fairgrounds — with a theme of water throughout — at Jackson Park along the shores of Lake Michigan.
Members of New York's delegation beseeched Congress to consider the fact that it made no sense to hold a world's fair celebrating Columbus's voyage of discovery in the center of the country. How could congress not select New York and the Atlantic Ocean?
On February 25, 1890, Congress shocked New York by selecting Chicago to host the greatest fair the country had ever seen, and arguably one to challenge the Paris spectacle that had just closed.
Chicago faced an arduous landscape and construction task, not to mention securing foreign and domestic public and private participants with just thirty months to go until the original congressional goal of opening on Columbus Day 1892.
Although many observers cited what they believed to be Chicago's failure to meet the deadline, any idea of reaching that goal had already been abandoned by the time the city was selected. Instead, the buildings and grounds would be dedicated in October 1892, and the actual opening of the fair would be six months later.
At this stage the Midway Plaisance as a part of the exposition was no more than a lovely boulevard adjacent to the main grounds. It was deemed a logical bit of land to add to the grounds of Jackson Park, but no one was quite sure how to use it as a complement to or a piece of the main fairgrounds.
The Midway Plaisance existed long before Chicago had any thought of hosting a fair. Hyde Park developer Paul Cornell had retained Frederick Law Olmsted, the acknowledged father of American landscape architecture, to develop plans for Washington Park and to consider creating a canal between Washington and Jackson Parks. The canal never came to fruition due to the water table and the relative elevations of the park and Lake Michigan — any such canal would have continually drained into the lake. These plans were developed more than two decades before construction on the fair began. Cornell envisioned the Plaisance as a centerpiece of a new community that would be home to a university and summer retreats for wealthy Chicagoans.
The Great Fire in 1871 put Cornell's plans on hold, and the Plaisance remained a tree-lined boulevard. By the time the University of Chicago opened it was 1892 and Olmsted was designing the Venetian waterways of the fairgrounds. He developed ambitious and creative ideas to cut, slice, and rearrange the dirt and swamp of Jackson Park into what was arguably the most beautiful world's fair site of the nineteenth — or any — century. Through it all, the Midway was the subject of much talk and virtually no action.
The Midway was a mile-long arrow pointing to the east and the main fairgrounds — to the Woman's and Horticulture Buildings at the west edge of the grounds, and on to the main lagoon, Wooded Island, Fisheries Building, and Lake Michigan.
As construction of the fair moved ahead at a hectic pace, the first idea, never fully developed, of how to incorporate the Midway was to lead fairgoers along an ethnographic journey of human evolution as they walked its length to the main grounds. Ethnography was a new scientific discipline, and its preeminent scholar was on the fair's staff. Frederick Putnam, the director of Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, had been appointed the fair's head of anthropology in January 1891. A condition of his taking the job was that the fair would provide him an ample budget to send crews around the world to collect specimens for display. With the benefit of hindsight, Putnam's and early science's rampage through villages and sacred sites around the globe has been justifiably criticized. However, exposition scientific teams did operate under strict guidelines developed for these early anthropologists and ethnologists. The fair developed comprehensive guidelines not only for the handling, labeling, shipping, and display of artifacts but for the conscientious gathering of specimens and respectful treatment of indigenous peoples and their lands. While the crews' excavation and other processes were not nearly as sophisticated as contemporary work, they paid unusually close attention to any disturbances of the cultures they sought to display.
Thankfully, the early plan for the Midway related to Putnam's ethnographic work was never realized. It called for visitors entering from the west to walk along a human evolution exhibit from one end of the Midway to the other. They would then enter the main grounds having seen the white Western human at the top of this evolutionary ladder. It was unclear who championed this idea, but the legacy of the fair would have suffered had it been undertaken. The nebulous idea as discussed among fair directors showed early man likened to other primates and moving through the ages, with the height of evolution being — of course — the civilized white man. History likely would have judged the fair and its Midway Plaisance as harshly as those fairs who presented "human zoos" of Africans and others. Fortunately for those who visited the World's Columbian Exposition, Putnam was too busy to become involved in creating such an exhibit, and instead a young entrepreneur named Sol Bloom rescued the Midway.
Creating the Midway
While the Columbian Exposition's main grounds and buildings were taking shape at a dizzying pace, fair management continued to struggle with just how to incorporate the Midway into the fair.
Chicago was not the first world's fair to feature sociocultural exhibits, but no other had conceived of a separate section of the fair focused on aboriginal peoples or entertainment as its own distinct section of a world's fair.
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Excerpted from Chicago's Grand Midway by Norman Bolotin, Christine Laing. Copyright © 2017 Norman P. Bolotin and Christine A. Laing. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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