Emily

A History of the Fair
The World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 was an event of immense cultural importance to an America nearing the turn of the century. From May 1 to October 31, 1893, Chicago and the Exposition were host to 27 million visitors--nearly one quarter of the country's population at the time. Fairs were an incredibly popular event in the nineteenth century; the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia drew over 10 million visitors in 1876 and Paris' extremely popular Exposition Universelles drew over 28 million to the city of lights. Fairs encompassed the spectrum of experience and interest of the 1800s--from sport to entertainment to high culture. To understand their importance and draw in modern terms, they could be seen as a combination of the Olympics, DisneyWorld, the Superbowl, and the National Gallery--an international entertainment and cultural event with lasting social importance.
 
By 1891, over 40,000 skilled laborers and workers were employed in the construction of the fair--at Jackson Park. Burnham headed up the selection of the Board of Architects who conceived the general design of the Fair's buildings and the Court of Honor, as well as the architects who would carry out the design and construction of the 200 additional buildings. Olmsted, Burnham, and the Board of Architects -- a group of Eastern architects generally trained at the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Paris -- decided on an unusual Fair plan. Utilizing the natural landscape of Jackson Park, Olmsted created a system of lagoons and waterways fed by Lake Michigan. These bodies of water served as decorative reflecting pools, waterways for transportation, and provided a place of respite necessary for weary summer visitors--the shady Wooded Island. The 14 main buildings surrounding the waterways were in the Beaux-Arts style, with its emphasis on logic, harmony, and uniformity. The Court of Honor buildings-- surrounding the Grand Basin with its massive gilded statue of the Republic--were covered with "staff," or stucco, giving the main buildings a magnificent whiteness and dazzling visitors who arrived at the rail terminal just outside the Fair's gates.
 
After three years of preparation and $28 million, the fair opened to great fanfare on May 1, 1893. One hundred thousand people crowded the Court of Honor to watch President Cleveland touch a golden lever, electrically sending the dynamo engines into motion; the Fair, after years of preparation, was finally underway. Visitors over the six months of the Fair's operation were excited, entertained, and overwhelmed. The Fair was calculated to be awe-inspiring, and in large part achieved its goal. Visitors were greeted with 633 total acres of Fairgrounds, 65,000 exhibits, and restaurant seating for 7,000. They were amazed by the clean and safe elevated railway and the electric launches plying the canals and lagoons. Guests, on the way to the entertainment and the spectacle of the Midway felt quite safe with the hundreds of Columbian Guards and plainclothes detectives on the grounds. Hundreds of concessionaires, selling everything from souvenir paperweights to popcorn and the newly invented carbonated soda, crowded the walkways, and nearly every day had a special theme for visitors to celebrate. The World's Congress Auxiliary held daily presentations and lectures, 5,978 in all, covering subjects including ethics, authors, economics, labor, and the mammoth week-long Congress of Religions. The event was massive, and its popularity was sustained: Chicago Day, held in the last month of the Fair, drew over 700,000 visitors.
 
http://columbus.gl.iit.edu/ <http://columbus.gl.iit.edu/>

Kerri

http://columbus.gl.iit.edu/dreamcity/00024011.html
Columbian Fountain

http://columbus.gl.iit.edu/dreamcity/16/00021024.jpg
Ferris Wheel

“Frederick Law Olmsted, America's foremost landscape architect, was responsible for laying out the fairgrounds. Jackson Park, the product of that effort, is still one of Chicago's most beautiful parks. A distinguished group of architects, including Henry Ives Cobb, Richard Morris Hunt, Charles McKim, George B. Post, and Louis Sullivan designed the exposition's buildings under the supervision of Daniel H. Burnham.”

http://blackboard.assumption.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab=courses=/bin/common/course.pl?course_id=_1063_1 <http://blackboard.assumption.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab=courses&url=/bin/common/course.pl?course_id=_1063_1>


http://www.chicagohs.org/history/expo/gif/grandcou.jpg
The Statue of the Republic symbolized the strength of a country that had survived a civil war and was taking in immigrants from all over the world. (photo by William
H. Jackson, CHS ICHi 17124)

"people who could dream this vision and make it real, those people...would press on to greater victories than this triumph of beauty--victories greater than the world had yet witnessed." (Memoirs of an American Citizen, 1905)

“While visitors flocked to the Fair's physical representation of unity, and in some sense utopia, reality had a terrible way of sneaking in. There were constant reminders of the growing economic problems of the country, which deepened into a four-year depression in the summer of 1893.”

 "White City represented itself as a representation, an admitted sham. Yet that sham, it insisted, held a truer vision of the real than did the troubled world sprawling beyond its gates." (Trachtenberg, 231) This was the America that the Directory and the visitors hoped they could achieve. And the route to this new America was through a sense of pride and unity in the country's accomplishments--beginning with a sense of cultural parity with Europe.”

Tony

-White City is just a term to describe the results and expansion of the Gilded, industrial, capitalistic, imperialistic period of America.
-The White City marks this dominantly rich, white male class superiority as a result of the industrial revolution, expansionism, and big business.
-the World’s Columbian Exposition, best gives a vision of what this White City is all about
-It was a time of great distress and conflicting views of what the Fair represented.
-It was causing people to be drawn into the miseries of the big business capitalist expansion, which resulted in great depression and unemployment and misery for lower classes.
-The White City represents exactly that, a transformation from agriculture to industry, in which cities developed, and were dominated by white male big business owners.
-It was a shift from the social control of the people to the business owners.
-This huge, immediate and dramatic shift caused great financial instability.  Many people flocking to the cities, leaving agriculture, looking for jobs, getting little, and crowding the streets, always result into depression.  Poor working conditions, unemployment, leads to strikes and socialist uprisings.  Americans were losing their identity because of how fast this transition to the White City was.
-The World Columbian Exposition was used to investigate these changes, and glorify what America has turned into, ultimately glamorizing the rise of this White City.
-It was a method to gain support for the new, industrialized, capitalistic, expansionist movement that swept the nation, regardless of the problems it stirred.
-Many found the purpose of the Exposition to serve more to enlighten the people about the new era of America, and to show them that the industrial big business opportunities is the future.
-Although there were problems, the exposition was right, where one can obviously see the effect it had even today, the amount of jobs and big business and the large influence capital plays on our society.
-It looked to make an impact on what the industrial revolution, and in essence, what the White City looked to accomplish, and that is change the face of American society and culture for the present and the future.  It looked to show the importance of big business and how it was necessary in order for the future survival of American society.
-The Columbian Exposition supported White City, that city which had the racist and depression like characteristics, but also had the modernity, technology, and capital that would be the new lasting framework of America.

Luke

Model Town

http://xroads.virigina.edu/%7EHYPER/Incorp/Pullman/town.html
     The exhibits of the Administration building, the Hotel Florence and Green Stone Church were marveled at by people for their ornate details. The library and Arcade were also marveled at for their luxurious conditions. It resulted in them becoming the plaster constructs for the world fair. The living quarters were less glamorous however with homes consisting of tenements and row houses named after inventors. The homes had no backyard and no front door for families living upstairs in the houses.

Visions of Pullman

www.library.cornell.edu/Reps/Docs/Pullman.htm
     The town was built as a center of industry and created homes for their employees. The homes were not remarkable for their appearance and the homes were similar looking to New England towns like Lenox and Stockbridge. The town grew rapidly in its population with it having 8,203 inhabitants by 1884. The Streets of the town were always kept in perfect condition and were very impressive despite how the majority of the town was mostly industrial workers. 

Cristi

The Hetch-Hetchy Dam Controversy <http://www.assumption.edu/users/mcclymer/His130/P-H/hetch%20hetchy/default.html>


“If the key word for Muir was pristine, for Pinchot it was use. They should, for example, correlate cutting in the nation's forests to the annual growth of new trees. They should protect the environment. This called for regulation and restriction. But it very emphatically also called for the use of resources.”

“The controversy over damming Hetch Hetchy Valley, a portion of Yosemite National Park, to provide water to San Francisco pitted leaders of the new conservation movement -- and competing definitions of conservation -- against each other. On the side of the dam was Gifford Pinchot, founder of the National Forest Service and close advisor to Theodore Roosevelt. Leading the opposition was John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club and the man in whose honor T.R. dedicated Muir Woods just north of San Francisco.”

Hetch Hetchy Chronology

“John Muir discovered the Hetch Hetchy valley in 1871, and it was part of the land set aside as Yosemite National Park in 1890. Few people ever saw Hetch Hetchy. You had to hike deep into the park. There were no trails, much less roads. For part of the year, as the snows melted, parts of the valley floor flooded. It was this runoff that the city of San Francisco wanted as a water supply. Tapping the water meant building a dam and flooding the entire valley permanently. This became the question: Should the United States preserve Hetch Hetchy or should it license the use of the water?”

An artist Albert Bierstadt painted scenes in the valley.

http://www.assumption.edu/users/mcclymer/His130/P-H/hetch%20hetchy/Hetch%20Hetchy%20Ca%96on%20by%20Albert%20Bi <http://www.assumption.edu/users/mcclymer/His130/P-H/hetch%20hetchy/Hetch%20Hetchy%20Ca%96on%20by%20Albert%20Bi>