America at the Fair Page 5
Among those attending the Philadelphia exposition was Albert Pope, a modestly successful toolmaker for the Massachusetts shoe industry. He was especially interested in the British-made early bicycles with a large front wheel and a small back wheel. In England these cycles were called “penny-farthings” but in the United States they were dubbed “high-wheelers.” Pope saw great promise in this bicycle and sailed for England to secure the patent rights. At first he imported bicycles but he soon set up production in Boston. The early bicycles cost $310, a fortune at the time and equal to a nine-month salary for a working man. The introduction of the cheaper “safety bicycle” with same-sized wheels and pneumatic tires produced a veritable craze among men and women alike. Pope enjoyed an early start in the bicycle business but was soon in competition with hundreds of imitators. The bicycle offered independence, adventure, and fun. During the 1890s, millions of bicycles were manufactured, to become a 100 million-dollar-a-year industry. The rich and the less rich, men and women, boys and girls, all rode their bicycles along the streets and in the parks. People loaded their bicycles onto trains and trolleys to travel to the beaches and parks. Bicycle clubs and bicycle racing became popular. Bicycles brought about changes in fashion. For women, comfortable bicycle clothes rather than stiff petticoats and constricting corsets became the fashions of the day. Clothiers “complained that only bicycle suits could be sold” (Andrews 1896).
Industrialization from Philadelphia to the Chicago Exposition
The success of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia led to a number of fairs in other American cities. In 1881 Atlanta hosted a cotton exposition and in 1883, Louisville followed with a display of the economic growth of the South. The 1884 Cotton Exposition was held in New Orleans at Audubon Park, fronting the Mississippi River. The New Orleans fair had 75,000 exhibits and was visited by six million people.
The breakneck expansion of innovation and industry during the final quarter of the 19th century allowed the United States to overtake Britain as the world’s leading industrial nation (Bensel 2000). In the process, America changed from agriculture into an urban industrial nation, complete with railroads, huge factories, and power plants belching smoke and soot. New York and Philadelphia became the great garment-making centers. Providence, Rhode Island was home to the Corliss steam engine, Gorham silverware, and numerous jewelry companies. Worcester and Springfield in Massachusetts made the tools for the factories. Schenectady was a center for locomotive building and home to Thomas Edison’s General Electric Company. Pittsburgh grew with the iron and steel industry and Detroit became famous as the center for parlor stove and kitchen range manufacture. By the close of the 19th century, New York handled more than half of the import and export trade of the whole of the United States and was the nation’s financial center.
The Fairbanks Scale Company had its start in 1824 in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, when the brothers Thaddeus and Erastus Fairbanks built a more efficient and dependable weighing device. Fairbanks showed its scales in Philadelphia in 1876. By the time of the 1893 Fair, Fairbanks was a world leader in scales.
The Corliss steam engine was one of the most famous exhibits at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Seventy feet tall and weighing 56 tons, the bulky machine produced 1,400 horsepower. It was built by George H. Corliss in his Providence, Rhode Island factory. By 1893, the Corliss was long superseded by more efficient engines made by General Electric, Westinghouse, and other machine shops.
Industrial power was rapidly shifting from the northeastern states to the Midwest and the South. Capital and textile machinery from Massachusetts moved to the South to benefit from cheaper labor, lower fuel costs, and local cotton. New England shoe and book makers opened stores in the booming Midwest, but later shifted to manufacturing in the towns of Endicott-Johnson, New York, and the cities of St. Louis and Chicago. Iron ore, wood, and coal brought in by rail to Chicago produced plows and harvesters and the machinery for textiles, shoes, parlor stoves, kitchen ranges, pianos, bicycles, and sewing machines. Missouri, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin also became industrialized and competed with the factories in the Northeast. The capital generated in the Midwest made it an important financial center, able to compete against the Eastern banks and insurance companies.
The table below shows the population growth in selected American cities during the 19th century. In 1800, New York was the largest city in the United States with 60,575 inhabitants. Only three other cities—Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston—had populations over 20,000. These historic cities were still recovering from the devastation of the Revolutionary War. The Midwestern cities did not yet exist or were only small villages, dependent on the fur trade. Easterners started the migration to the Midwest and were followed by immigrants from Europe. Chicago grew on the site of Fort Dearborn. In 1833 it had 360 people, but grew to 4,170 in just four years. Chicago welcomed its first railroad in 1848 and two years later its population jumped to 29,063. Chicago experienced spectacular growth during the second half of the 19th century, and by 1900, with 1,698,575 people, it was the second largest city in the United States. Other Midwestern cities also grew. French fur traders founded St. Louis, which grew after the Louisiana Purchase and prospered with grains and cattle. In 1900, its population was 575,238. Cleveland was a mere village in 1820 but boasted 381,768 people in 1900. Buffalo grew with the construction of the Erie Canal. Charleston, South Carolina was one of the largest American port cities in 1800, but its economic importance declined after the Civil War. New Orleans benefited mightily from Midwest grains floated down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, but these deliveries stopped during the Civil War.
During the second half of the 19th century, the population of the United States grew threefold from 23,191,867 to 75,995,000. Much of this growth came from immigrants who flocked to the cities, where they crowded into tenements, trying to adapt to the New World yet clinging to their native languages and traditions. Jacob A. Riis, in his 1890 book How the Other Half Lives, dramatically portrayed the harsh life of the immigrants. Himself an immigrant from Denmark, Riis described the overcrowded and squalid conditions of New York’s Italian, Jewish, Chinese, and Czech immigrants. There were gangs of homeless children, girls working 16-hour days for $2 a week, and tenement sweatshops, in which men and women stitched clothes piecemeal during the day in the same rooms where they slept at night. Many of these immigrants could not make it on the harsh streets of New York and Chicago and returned in failure to their home countries (Riis 1890).
Life for the working men and women—even American born—was hard. Families in the cities made do on $500–800 a year, living in rented apartments with little furniture and few possessions. Unemployment was widespread, especially during the depression of 1893–1897. In Chicago, thousands of the homeless sought nightly shelter in police stations or settlement houses (Patterson 2000). Those with jobs worked 10–12 hour days with few benefits. On average, men died before their 47th birthday and women two years later. America still had five million farms, but the cities and towns were fast gaining population. The growth of the Northeast was slowing down as the Midwest and South gained in population and industry. The flow of people into California, Texas, and Florida was yet to come. National wealth increased with mining, agriculture and manufacturing success, and population growth. In 1880 the national wealth was $21.4 billion dollars and by 1890, it had more than tripled to $65 billion. The Brooklyn Bridge, completed in 1883, and the Niagara Suspension Bridge, were symbols of American engineering prowess.
The 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the New World was fast approaching. The Paris Exposition Universelle Internationale of 1889—with Alexandre Gustav Eiffel’s tower reaching nearly 1,000 feet into the sky—galvanized the United States to display its own prowess. In May 1893, America was ready to celebrate.
3. FROM VILLAGE TO METROPOLIS
In the spring of 1779, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable settled on the northern shore of the Chicago River. He was proba
bly a freed slave from Saint-Domingue, where 20,000 Frenchmen ruled over a half million African slaves toiling on the sugarcane plantations. A number of these Frenchmen and their servants left the Caribbean island and settled in southern Louisiana to grow indigo and sugarcane. Jean Baptiste made his way north from there to Lake Michigan, where he built his cabin and traded in furs.
After the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 a garrison of 60 American soldiers built Fort Dearborn at Baptiste’s site. The isolated fort was attacked during the War of 1812 and most of the residents were killed. The abandoned fort was rebuilt four years later to guard the western frontier. Protected by the army, settlers came to seek their fortune in the fur trade. Schooners regularly docked near the river mouth, bringing people and supplies from Lake Erie.
The budding town had several taverns, stores, churches, and ferries. Land speculation hit in 1836 with the construction of the Illinois and Michigan Canal. In March 1837, with a population of 4,170, Chicago was proclaimed a city. The speculative fever cooled during the Panic of 1837 but heated up again; by 1850, the population of Chicago reached 29,963. The first steam locomotive arrived in 1848 with the completion of the Galena to Chicago line. Soon, railroads linked Chicago to towns and cities in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas. Other lines ran to St. Louis and Cincinnati, to Toledo, Cleveland, and Buffalo, and onwards to New York or Boston. Chicago was also connected by rail to Toronto and Montreal. After the Civil War, new railroads ran to the southern states, while others were extended west to reach San Francisco and Los Angeles. The Chicago-based railroad companies bought up vast areas of open land close by their routes to the West, which they sold to the settlers. Chicago companies such as U.S. Wind Engine & Pump and Aermotor did a brisk business selling windmills to farmers in these dry lands.
How Chicago Grew
Situated close to the prairies and the forests, Chicago grew at a spectacular rate. The richness of its soil drew Easterners and immigrant farmers by the hundreds of thousands to the open plains, where wheat, oats, and barley grew abundantly. Further west, herds of cattle fed on the lush grasses. Sheep and hogs prospered. North of the prairies in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and northern Michigan grew vast forests of maple, birch, and pine (Cronon 1991). These trees, growing straight and tall, were cut during the winter months and, in the spring, floated down the rivers to the saw mills along the banks of Lake Michigan. The wood was used to build the farmhouses, barns, and enclosures and, in the winter months, burned for heat.
Situated at the southwest corner of Lake Michigan, Chicago was in an ideal position to handle the passage of grains from the prairie farms and wood from the northern forests. Before the era of the railroads, nature’s bounty was hauled by ox-wagon or floated down the rivers and streams. After 1850 vast quantities of grain and lumber, as well as cattle, sheep, and hogs were transported to Chicago quickly, cheaply, and reliably by freight trains. The wheat, barley, and oats were stored in Chicago’s grain elevators and the livestock was directed into the stockyards before being shipped to markets in the East. The flow of goods in and out of the booming city created numerous opportunities for employment. People sought work as laborers, brokers, dockworkers, clerks, and insurance agents. In 1858, a total of 6,882 ships entered or left the Chicago harbor, carrying grain, lumber, hides, meat, lard, and other products. By 1871, the number of ships and total tonnage had almost doubled. In 1858, the city handled four million bushels of grain. In 1871, the figure exceeded 11 million bushels.
This view of Chicago in 1847 shows the Chicago River entering Lake Michigan and the harbor with sail ships and steamers.
During its early years, Chicago attracted many ambitious men from New England and upstate New York. Mostly Protestant and from small towns, they followed the Erie Canal and the Pennsylvania Canal system west in search of land and opportunity. These transplanted Yankees gathered the reins of power to establish the rising Midwestern aristocracy. As their forebears had done in the Northeast, they rose to political power, controlled the newspapers, banks, and insurance companies, as well as the grain, lumber, and meat businesses. They molded public opinion in their own image. The Eastern transplants hired the immigrants streaming in from Europe to work in their factories and slaughterhouses, and to build their new city. William Butler Ogden (1805–1877) was born in the village of Walton, New York and came to Chicago in 1835. He made his fortune in land speculation and in 1837 was elected the first mayor of Chicago. Later, Ogden was president of several Chicago railroad companies, including the Galena & Chicago. Gustavus Swift from Sandwich, Massachusetts and Philip Danforth Armour from Stockbridge, New York were pioneers in the livestock business. First they shipped live cattle and hogs, but later sent dressed meat in refrigerated freight cars. Cyrus McCormick of Rockport County, Virginia and William Deering of South Paris, Maine built harvester machines in their vast factories in Chicago. George Pullman, born in Brocton, New York, constructed his railroad car company in the town of Pullman near Chicago. The brothers Charles and Nathan Mears, natives of Billerica, Massachusetts controlled a vast lumber business from their Chicago offices. Marshall Field, born on a farm in western Massachusetts, arrived in Chicago at age 19 in 1853. He found work as a sales clerk in a dry goods store and rose to the ownership of the largest department store chain in the Midwest. William Wallace Kimball of Maine sold Boston-made pianos before starting his own piano factory in Chicago. Walter Loomis Newberry of East Windsor, Connecticut came to Chicago in 1833 and made his fortune in real estate, banking, and railroads. Charles M. Henderson left New England in 1853 to start Henderson & Company, which became one of the leading shoe companies in the Midwest.
The abundance of trees in North America encouraged many efforts to mechanize the sawing of logs. Marvin Smith of New Buffalo, Michigan patented his hand-powered sawing machine on October 31, 1882. The Folding Sawing Company was at 303–311 South Canal Street, Chicago. Gas engine–powered saws became available early in the 20th century.
Until the 1860s, the Midwest remained largely dependent on northeastern factories for textiles, shoes, and machinery. The Boston piano and organ maker Mason & Hamlin expanded to Chicago, as did many other eastern companies. Bringing iron ore by rail from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and coal from the mines of southern Illinois, the city of Chicago moved from a transportation hub to a manufacturing center. With hides, minerals, and lumber close by along with its vast railroad connections, Chicago became the industrial center of the Midwest, making shoes, textiles, stoves, sewing machines, tools, and furniture. The great demand for farm machinery and fencing created a major steel industry. In the late 1880s, Elbert Henry Gary, a Chicago lawyer and industrialist, formed the American Steel & Wire Company out of many small wire companies to create a virtual monopoly. The steel town of Gary, Indiana is named for him.
The transplanted easterners built their large mansions on the North Side and dominated the city’s social life. They established the Rush Medical Center, the Chicago Historical Society, the Chicago Horticultural Society, the Art Institute, Northwestern University, and the University of Chicago. Benjamin Hutchinson’s roots went back to the earliest days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Benjamin, a modest shoemaker, left Lynn, Massachusetts in 1856 with his young family and traveled west. In Chicago, he entered the pork-packing business and later made his fortune at the Chicago Board of Trade. His son, Charles Lawrence Hutchinson (1854–1924), also born in Lynn, started as a grain merchant, then went into banking before assuming the presidency of the Chicago Board of Trade. A man of discipline and energy, he was a trustee of the University of Chicago and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He was passionate about art and served for many years as president of the Art Institute of Chicago. Hutchinson traveled regularly to Europe where he met the Impressionist painters and bought their works. He encouraged Chicago’s super-rich to collect paintings and to donate their collections to the Art Institute. Charles Hutchinson was later selected chairman of the Fine Arts Committee of the World’s
Columbian Exposition. Another Yankee, John Wentworth, born in Sandwich, New Hampshire was the editor of the Chicago Democratic. He served two terms as mayor of his adopted city and was a six-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives.
The Chicago Stove Company was situated at 22nd and Blue Island Streets on Chicago’s industrialized Lower East Side. Nearby, at 22nd and Western Avenue, was the McCormick Reaper Works.
Many of the first 30 mayors of Chicago hailed from small towns in New England or New York. Protestant and with deep roots in American soil, this Chicago elite ruled over a veritable Tower of Babel of disoriented immigrants who spoke German, Swedish, Yiddish, Italian, Polish, French, or Greek. The newcomers moved into their own ethnic neighborhoods where they bought their familiar foods, established their own institutions, and read their own newspapers. Chicago was a city filled with immigrants, but it was the small Yankee elite that set the rules of the game (Dedmon 1981, Miller 1996).
In 1860, the Republican National Convention was held in Chicago. Trains from across the nation carried the 40,000 delegates and visitors to Chicago. On May 18, 1860, the third day of the convention and on the third ballot, Abraham Lincoln of Illinois received 231-and-a-half votes of the 233 needed to win nomination. At this juncture, the Ohio delegation shifted four votes to Lincoln and he was chosen as his party’s candidate for the presidency of the United States. Nearly five years later, on April 15, 1865 the 56-year-old Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre in Washington. The Lincoln Funeral Train reached Chicago at 11:00 a.m. on May 1. A bereaved city paid homage with a procession down Michigan Avenue to the Cook County Courthouse, where Lincoln’s body lay in state. Hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans came to bid their president farewell before the body was returned to the train for its final journey to Springfield.