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ventions in human relations. We were dropping the hand-made, taking up the machine-made; leaving the farm to enter the factory; dropping the issues associated with the Civil War and its aftermath and thinking about questions arising out of new economic conditions; edging away from classic Greek and Latin ideals of education to

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take up science. Johns Hopkins, founded in 1876, had the first adequately equipped physical laboratory in America, supplanting the ancient dynasty of the clergyman college-president with the economist and the administrator. In short, we were sprouting new coats, physical and mental, whose mature nature was not to be seen clearly until well after 1900.

III

The World's Fair at Chicago in 1893 was one of the most far-reaching stimulants to men's imaginations

THE WORLD'S FAIR

189

America has ever seen. It was the largest, the most generally attended, and in practically every respect the best of the many America has had. The mood it evoked in the average American was one of awed exhilaration. Chicago, seen for the first time by millions of Americans, caused them to realize the miracle of the West's growth. Less than a mature lifetime before, in 1837, wolves had howled in what, by 1893, were to be Chicago's1 principal business streets, and the largest enterprise of civilization west of the Alleghenies had been John Jacob Astor's furtrading business.

The reproductions of the Pinta, Niña, and Santa Maria, sent to the World's Fair by the Queen of Spain to recall that adventure of Columbus which was the beginning of our history, caused us to think of ourselves as having traditions, made us nationally self-conscious. The reproduction of an early railroad-train alongside a Pullman of the day, together with models of what were in the nineties the grandest ocean ships, the Teutonic and Majestic, and the foreign villages and folk along the Midway, stimulated Americans to travel to an extent they had not before. The assembling from America and Europe of new models of machinery and architecture, the Court of Honor, the rich collections of statuary and paintings, caused nearly every person of the millions2 who visited the Fair to go home with his soul enriched, his mind expanded and more flexible.

The picture written by Harry Thurston Peck was not too highly colored. He described the competition of St. Louis, New York, and other cities for the honor of cele

1 Julian Street writes me: "The Chicago house in which I lived as a baby was on a street following the old Indiana trail by which, in 1812, the remnants of Fort Dearborn's garrison retreated after the massacre toward Detroit. That was 67 years, the lifetime of a not very old man, before my birth."

2 Rollin Lynde Hartt says I should emphasize that "it was 'Main Street' that went to the Fair-the 'best people' had a slight disdain for it." This was one reason for its wide-spreading beneficence.

brating the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America, the jeering predictions that a city so new as Chicago, so material in most of its aspects, could not rise to the spirit of the occasion. Then:

On the lakeside, a rough, unkempt, and tangled stretch of plain and swamp became transmuted into a shimmering dream

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The Administration Building at the World's Fair on Chicago Day.

of loveliness under the magic touch of landscape-gardener and architect and artist. No felicity of language can bring before the eye that never saw them those harmonies which consummate Art, brooding lovingly over Nature, evolved into that maze of beauty. Not one of the 12,000,0001 human beings who set foot within the Court of Honor, the crowning glory of the whole, could fail to be thrilled with a new and poignant sense of what both Art and Nature truly mean. The stately colonnades, the graceful arches, the clustered sculptures, the

1 This is a conservative estimate after deducting duplicate admissions. It represents more than one out of every six of the population of the United States..

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gleaming domes, the endless labyrinth of snowy columns, all diversified by greenery and interlaced by long lagoons of quiet water here were blended form and color in a symmetrical and radiant purity such as modern eyes, at least, had never looked upon before. It was the sheer beauty of its wonderful

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In the presence of a company of experts Alexander Graham Bell opened the New York-Chicago telephone circuit in 1893.

ensemble, rather than the wealth of its exhibits, that made this exposition so remarkably significant in the history of such undertakings, and especially in its effect upon American civilization.. The importance of the Columbian Exposition lay in the fact that it revealed to millions of Americans whose lives were necessarily colorless and narrow, the splendid possibilities of art and the compelling power of the beautiful..

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The far-reaching influence of the demonstration was not one that could be measured by any formal test. But a study of American conditions will certainly reveal an accelerated appreciation of the graces of life and a quickening of the aesthetic sense throughout the whole decade which followed the creation of what Mr. H. C. Bunner most felicitously designated as the White City.

Not merely for a decade, as Mr. Peck was able to record in 1905, but unto this day the Chicago World's Fair left its mark in heightened appreciation of art, and all the fruits of an immense stimulation of the American mind. It brought the change from chromo art to higher forms on the walls of American parlors, and gave birth to what later came to be called "city planning." To the World's Fair more than one American city1 owes the greater beauty of its avenues, parks, and ornaments; thousands of American homes the greater beauty of their architecture, furniture, and decorations; millions of American individuals their greater appreciation of beauty and their greater opportunity to enjoy it.

A more rhapsodical description, but one probably not far distant from the impression made on the average American, came from Halsey C. Ives, chief of the Department of Fine Arts at the Exposition:

Never, since the first gray dawn of time, has there been such a collection of works of genius, such an assembly of master

1 Mr. Ernest I. Lewis, United States interstate commerce commissioner, whose judgment is valuable because of his eager curiosity about the significant in contemporary history, and because of his well-stocked mind acquired through much travel and long newspaper experience, writes: "I think the World's Fair at Chicago did fully as much as you indicate. All through the last twenty-five years there has been a wonderful registration of its effect. You find it in architecture, in community centres; in parking systems and playgrounds; Kansas City, Washington, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, are good examples. The Chicago Fair was the first popular demonstration of the beauty of orderliness, of proper proportions, of classical lines-it was the death-blow, in short, to the Queen Anne and other flamboyant and helter-skelter concepts that had previously existed. The World's Fair, plus the Christian Science Church's adoption of the classical as its standard of construction, plus a better planning of Federal buildings through the country, has made the U. S. A. a decidedly better-looking place in which to live. This has been worked out principally in the first quarter of the present century."

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