Fair Weather (14 page)

Across the fairgrounds in the Hall of Music, the Honorable Carter Henry Harrison began to ring down the curtain on the fair before a convention of his fellow mayors. “This World’s Fair has been the greatest educator of the nineteenth century . . . It has been the greatest educator the world has ever known,” he said. “I myself have taken a new lease of life, and I believe I shall see the day when Chicago will be the biggest city in America.”

The White City on the shores of the inland sea reached for the sky and promised a steam-driven, electrically lit future of peace and prosperity through progress.

But the fair ended on an ominous note.

When Mayor Harrison returned home from his last speech, he was shot dead at his front door by an assassin. The final night of the fair had been planned as a spectacular sound and light show, but in mourning for the mayor, the flags were lowered in silence, and all “music, oratory, and pyrotechnical displays” were canceled. The fair closed with the tolling of a funeral bell, and the huge Westinghouse searchlight made a final sweep of the grounds and went dark.

Still, the World’s Columbian Exposition altered the future and changed the face of the nation in large ways and small. The ideal vision of a city rising out of pools and plazas informed city planning through the century to come. The fair’s Greek and Roman pavilions reappeared in many a pillared and porticoed public building. The exotic Japanese and Turkish architecture inspired the revolutionary designs of a young Chicago architect named Frank Lloyd Wright.

The fair inspired another Chicago man, L. Frank Baum, to create a mythical land in his series of books beginning with
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
The White City became, on the page, the Emerald City. The Czech composer Antonín Dvořák was moved by the fair to write his
New World Symphony,
and Scott Joplin went on to syncopate a new century in ragtime.

The fair’s founders aimed to educate the populace, but the populace flocked to the fair, and the Midway, to have a good time. They rode George Ferris’s great wheel for
the thrill and the view, not because it was a mechanical miracle. The wheel that had become the true symbol, the Eiffel Tower, of the fair outlived it to be set up again in St. Louis for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904. Only then was it dismembered, and its metal bones now lie under the Forest Park golf course in St. Louis.

But not before it inspired thousands more, smaller Ferris wheels. The Midway itself, with its bouncy blend of beer gardens, bears on bicycles, peep shows, joy rides, and such personalities as Lillian Russell, Gentleman Jim Corbett, and the gyrating Little Egypt became the American carnival, touring every small town by rail and road before it took root again and became the theme park. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World outgrossed both fair and Midway, inspiring a new, purely American entertainment, the rodeo.

The world was never the same again. Products introduced in the pavilions and along the Midway—hamburgers, carbonated drinks, Cream of Wheat, Juicy Fruit gum among them—became staples of the consumerist society.

Perhaps a more important legacy of the fair was the collective memory of those who glimpsed its wonders as their first vision of the world as it was, and as it might be. In millions of minds the great wheel kept turning in the summer sky above the incandescent White City that seemed to banish darkness and doubt.

Cover: Chromolithograph of the Ferris wheel, World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893, by permission of the Chicago Historical Society (ICHi-23666). Artist: Charles Graham.

Pages vi-vii
: Court of Honor looking east toward the Grand Plaza, World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893, by permission of the Chicago Historical Society (photo 00119). Photographer: C. D. Arnold.

Page 37
: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World, souvenir booklet cover, 1893, by permission of the Chicago Historical Society (ICHi-29777). Creators: Cody and Salsbury.

Page 71
: Western Entrance of Midway Plaisance, World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893, by permission of the Paul V. Galvin Library Digital History Collection, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago. Photographer unknown.

Page 97
: Woman’s Building, with footbridge in foreground, World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893, by permission of the Chicago Historical Society (ICHi-16265). Photographer: Harrison.

Page 121
: Lillian Russell, year unknown, by permission of the Chicago Historical Society (ICHi-31653). Photographer unknown.

Page 136
: View from roof of Manufacturers & Liberal Arts building, World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893, by permission of the Chicago Historical Society (ICHi-02525). Photographer: C. D. Arnold.

Page 138
: Col. William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, year unknown, by permission of the Chicago Historical Society (ICHi-31653). Photographer: Stacy.

Richard Peck, the acclaimed author of more than twenty-five novels, has received numerous awards for his work, including the Newbery Medal for
A Year Down Yonder,
the Newbery Honor for its prequel,
A Long Way from Chicago,
and the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in young adult literature. Mr. Peck grew up in Decatur, Illinois, and now lives in New York City.

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