Brilliant (16 page)

Night at the fair had come a long way since London's Crystal Palace, or Great Exhibition of 1851, which had closed at dusk. Not until the 1867 Paris Exposition did a world's fair stay open at night. There gas and oil lamps "were used lavishly[,]...music and theatricals were supplied of satisfactory character and quality, restaurants and cafés were kept open, and the exposition generally was given as gay and festive an air as possible. The prodigal expenditure of time, money and labor were without avail, however, and the effort to force attendance after dark was a signal failure, solely because of the insufficient light, and the refusal of the people to be entertained in the dark." Only in the 1880s did evenings at fairs and expositions begin to succeed. Most notably, at the Paris Exposition of 1889, the grounds were officially illuminated with more than a thousand arc lights and almost nine thousand incandescent bulbs (in addition to private displays).

The White City not only had more lights than the 1889 exposition; it had more lights than any real city in the country. Every day, the lights at the exposition consumed three times the electricity used to illuminate nearby Chicago. And the fair required electricity for mechanical power as well: a moving sidewalk equipped with chairs transported people who arrived by boat from Lake Michigan to the heart of the fairgrounds; electric boats, along with the gondolas, ferried people across the manmade lake—lined with statuary and dotted with fountains—at the city's center; and the world's first Ferris wheel carried passengers seated in Pullman cars 264 feet in the air, giving them a kaleidoscopic view of the city, Lake Michigan, and the Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan countryside before it brought them back to earth.

If Chicagoans, who had already grown accustomed to electric light and gaslight, were stunned by the "brilliance almost too dazzling for the human eye to rest upon," how must it have seemed to the many visitors from small settlements and farms along the Mississippi Valley and in the surrounding states who'd left homes that were illuminated only with oil lamps and candles? To those from rural places everywhere? As one young girl, newly arrived from Poland, exclaimed, "Having seen nothing but kerosene lamps for illumination, this was like getting a sudden vision of Heaven." Country visitors knew that the future lay in the cities—the young had been leaving the farms for decades, and rural life, based on the self-sufficiency of the family, had ceased to be typical. To them, the fair might have been not only dazzling but also consoling in its stark contrast to Chicago or any other late-nineteenth-century American city, for the White City—full of oddity, irony, brilliance, grace, and absurdity—was also a dream city, one without the burden of reality: a city without factories or tenements, skyscrapers, stockyards, slaughterhouses, trash heaps, coal ash, or tax collectors. Its furnaces ran on oil piped in from forty miles away, and the tenders wore white uniforms. What trash the visitors scattered about the grounds was picked up every night and carted away.

Chicago, with a population of more than a million, was the American city of the moment, having grown and flourished, observed architect Louis Sullivan, "by virtue of pressure from without—the pressure of forest, field and plain, the mines of copper, iron and coal, and the human pressure of those who crowded in upon it from all sides seeking fortune." Along with its stockyards, train yards, smokestacks, and factories, it could brag of having two dozen skyscrapers—more than any other city at the time—as well as three dozen railroads and hundreds of millionaires. Advertising splashed across the sides of streetcars and loomed on large billboards. "Chicago, one might say, was after all only a Newer York," suggested writer and editor William Dean Howells, "an ultimated Manhattan, the realized ideal of that largeness, loudness and fastness, which New York has persuaded the Americans is metropolitan." Electric wires cluttered the air above the streets. The elevated railways clanged and screeched. Grime and soot settled upon the city's countless poor and working poor, their broken-down tenements, and the red-light district. "'Undisciplined'—that is the word for Chicago," proclaimed H. G. Wells, "a scrambling, ill-mannered, undignified, unintelligent development of material resources."

Strange to think that much of it had risen out of the ashes of its infamous and devastating fire in 1871. Stranger still to consider that sixty years before the exposition, at a time when thousands of gaslights already lined the streets of London and Paris, Chicago was a French and Indian trading village of fewer than four thousand residents, its homes and shops illuminated with tallow lamps and candles. The area had been home to the Prairie Potawatomis, known as the People of the Place of Fire for the way they set the country alight to burn off young trees and old grasses so as to keep the prairie vigorous for game, a world where people kept alive even the smallest flame brought to life from the friction between hardwood and softwood.

Perhaps they husbanded fire in the manner of the Blackfeet, who had once inhabited the country west of Illinois. Around the time of the White City, naturalist George Grinnell wrote of the them:

Within the memory of men now living ... fire used to be carried from place to place in a "fire horn." This was a buffalo horn slung by a string over the shoulder like a powder horn. The horn was lined with moist, rotten wood, and the open end had a wooden stopper or plug fitted to it. On leaving camp in the morning, the man who carried the horn took from the fire a small live coal and put it in the horn, and on this coal placed a piece of punk [a fungus that grows on birch trees, which the Blackfeet gathered and dried], and then plugged up the horn with the stopper. The punk smouldered in this almost air-tight chamber, and, in the course of two or three hours, the man looked at it, and if it was nearly consumed, put another piece of punk in the horn. The first young men who reached the appointed camping ground would gather two or three large piles of wood in different places, and as soon as some one who carried a fire horn reached camp, he turned out his spark at one of these piles of wood, and a little blowing and nursing gave a blaze which started the fire. The other fires were kindled from this first one, and when the women reached camp and had put the lodges up, they went to these fires, and got coals with which to start those in their lodges. The custom of borrowing coals persisted up to the last days of the buffalo, and indeed may even be noticed still.

At the World's Columbian Exposition, the Native American exhibits were installed in or near the Anthropological Building. According to historian Robert Rydell, "The Native Americans who participated in the exhibits ... were the victims of a torrent of abuse and ridicule. With Wounded Knee only three years removed, the Indians were regarded as apocalyptic threats to the values embodied in the White City." The verbal threats, perhaps, weren't the worst they had to endure. As it so happened, Rydell notes, "several of the exhibits of Dakota, Sioux, Navajos, Apaches, and various northwestern tribes were on or near the Midway Plaisance, which immediately degraded them."

The Midway Plaisance, a mile-long entertainment district, led up to the entrance of the White City proper. The cultures deemed by the organizers as "barbarous and semi-civilized" were jumbled there along with food concessions and the Ferris wheel: a Moorish mosque, a Tunisian village, an Egyptian temple, a bazaar from India selling Benares brassware and inlaid metalwork, the huts of South Sea Islanders, a settlement of Laplanders complete with reindeer that pulled sleds around a circus ring. The official history of the exposition notes: "Here was an opportunity to see these people of every hue, clad in outlandish garb, living in curious habitations, and plying their unfamiliar trades and arts with incomprehensible dexterity.... There were three thousand of these denizens of the Midway gathered from all quarters of the earth."

If, in the future, the honky-tonk sideshows and game booths of midways would be most garishly lit, in 1893 this very first midway claimed a smaller portion of electric light than other areas of the fair, although that didn't stop it from being enormously popular in the evening. As visitors arriving from Chicago walked along the mall toward the entrance to the White City, they could sample chapati and yogurt, Cracker Jack, stuffed cabbage, hamburgers, or steamed clams while they watched boxing matches, donkey races, beauty contests, camel drivers, belly dancers, and sword fighting in a street typical of Algiers. They could listen to a German brass band, Sumatran gong players, Chinese cymbalists, or Dahomean tom-tom players.

The Dahomey village housed sixty-nine people, "of whom twenty-one were Amazon warriors," notes the official history. "Sight-seers ... were fascinated with the savagery of the fetich war dance performed by the Amazons." This exhibit was particularly galling to African American writer and lecturer Frederick Douglass, an ex-slave: "As if to shame the Negro," he wrote, "the Dahomians are also here to exhibit the Negro as a repulsive savage.... It must be admitted that, to outward seeming, the colored people of the United States have lost ground and have met with increased and galling resistance since the war of the rebellion." Almost thirty years after the end of the Civil War, the black population of the country stood at more than 7.5 million, yet not one black person had been included in the planning committee for the exposition. "When it was ascertained that the seals and glaciers of Alaska had been overlooked in the appointment of National Commissioners, it was a comparatively easy task for the President to manipulate matters so that he could give the far away land a representative," observed Ferdinand L. Barnett, editor of Chicago's first black newspaper. "It was entirely different, however, with the colored people. When the fact was laid before the President that they had been ignored and were entirely unrepresented, he found his hands tied."

Not only had black people no representation on the planning committee, but they also had almost no formal presence at the fair. The White City housed more than sixty-five thousand exhibits, which seemed to one observer to be "the contents of a great dry goods store mixed up with the contents of museums." It included a Japanese teahouse, the dungeons of the Inquisition, and the electric chair; sea anemones, devilfish, sharks, catfish, and perch; Bach's clavichord, Mozart's spinet, and Beethoven's grand piano; almost every known fruit and vegetable seed; examples of pests that afflicted crops and pesticides used to counter them; more than a hundred exhibits on tobacco and more than another hundred on nuts; a Statue of Liberty carved out of salt; a thirty-five-foot tower of navel oranges—the oranges changed every few weeks—topped by a stuffed eagle; a Liberty Bell made out of wheat, oats, and rye; a map of the United States made out of pickles; and a 2 2,ooo-pound mass of cheese encased in iron. Within that glut of variousness, African Americans could claim only several exhibits by black colleges; a painting by George Washington Carver; Edmonia Lewis's sculpture of Hiawatha; and "Aunt Jemima," portrayed by a former slave who wore a red bandana and flipped pancakes outside the R. T. Davis Milling Company booth.

To counter and protest the lack of a dignified presence for blacks, Douglass, antilynching activist Ida B. Wells, Irvine Garland Penn, and Ferdinand L. Barnett published a pamphlet,
The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition,
which detailed the successes of blacks, the colleges they had established, and the inroads they'd made in medicine, law, and the arts. "We earnestly desired to show some results of our first thirty years of acknowledged manhood and womanhood," Douglass wrote in his introduction. "Wherein we have failed, it has been not our fault but our misfortune, and it is sincerely hoped that this brief story, not only of our successes, but of [our] trials and failures, our hopes and disappointments will relieve us of the charge of indifference and indolence.... And hence we send forth this volume to be read of all men."

The struggle of African Americans for a presence in the White City anticipated the inequalities to come concerning electric light in their lives. Although at the time of the fair, electric light in homes was still a luxury attainable by only the very wealthy, its ubiquity throughout the Court of Honor must have given people a sense that its place in everyday life was inevitable. But electric lines wouldn't arrive in ordinary urban and suburban households for decades, and in rural homes for decades after that. Black neighborhoods would be among the last lit in cities—long after electricity had come to seem a matter of course in white neighborhoods—and rural blacks would have an even longer wait than rural whites. The longer they waited for electric light, which would continue to grow ever brighter and become ever more a symbol of modernity, the greater the disparity would seem, for electricity did say yes or no with the same voice: the lines ran—or did not run—along the streets and into the homes; electric light suffused entire windows (whereas oil lamps did not). Thus the distinction between those with and those without would come to be as pronounced as the gulf between the Midway Plaisance and the Court of Honor.

At that time, however, when electricity in the home was out of reach for almost everyone, more visitors wandered among the exhibits in the Electricity Building than at any other exposition site, especially in the evening, when it was the brightest place in the White City. After visitors walked past the statue of Benjamin Franklin—"his gaze turned upward toward the lowering clouds, in one hand the kite, and in the other the key of which all the world has read"—they encountered the General Electric exhibit, with its displays of Edison's phonograph and his Kinetoscope, which continually projected a short film of British prime minister William Gladstone addressing the House of Commons. Beyond, visitors could peruse twenty-five hundred specimens of Edison incandescent lamps—"no two of which were alike, being in many colors and in candle power ranging from ½-c.p. to 300-c.p"—and other lamps in different stages of construction, as well as examples of the filaments that Edison carbonized in his quest for incandescent light and examples of his dynamos. At the center of it all stood Edison's Tower of Light, an eighty-two-foot-high column built of thousands of miniature colored lamps that flashed in various designs. It was crowned by a huge incandescent bulb made of cut glass.