Celebrating the New World

by Robert Muccigrosso

It was the most astonishing fair ever. "The grandest exposition this planet has ever witnessed," wrote one observer of the Columbian Exposition. A spectacular neoclassical "White City" designed by the nation's leading architects under the direction of Daniel Burnham; innumerable exhibits of science, technology, and the arts from throughout the world; a meeting place for a remarkable variety of social, intellectual, and religious groups; and a Midway of sometimes up-lifting, sometimes exotic attractions - all staged in that boisterous and fascinating city of wealth, culture, and corruption, Chicago. No fair since has so captured the imagination of the American people - indeed, people throughout the world. More than 27 million visitors (an extraordinary figure for 1893) came to see the great Chicago World's Fair, and it entertained them enormously. Its legacies - to literature, music, architecture, and city planning, among many fields - were notable. But the Columbian Exposition was also