America 100: The Great Centennial Fair

Editor’s Note: Fergus M. Bordewich is the author of ten books of history. Portions of this essay appeared in his recently published book, Centennial: The Great Fair of 1876 and the Invention of America’s Future, which looks at the great exhibition and the converging crises that the United States was facing during its centennial year.

On the morning of May 10, 1876, Ulysses S. Grant stepped from his overnight quarters on Walnut Street in downtown Philadelphia to be greeted by an escort of brass bands, massed sailors and soldiers, cavalry in horse-tailed helmets, admirals and generals, governors and Supreme Court justices, magnates of industry, politicians of every rank and stripe, foreign ambassadors, and the president’s guest of honor, the emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro II. They were the advance guard of the most spectacular public extravaganza to be mounted in Gilded Age America, the long-anticipated celebration of the nation’s first Centennial, a figurative stone’s throw from Independence Hall, where the Founding Fathers had signed the Declaration of Independence.

In carriages, on horseback, and on foot the festive cavalcade processed along streets festooned with patriotic bunting and the flags of all nations, through roaring crowds of men, women, and children to Fairmount Park, two miles to the north, which a year’s labor had transformed into a theater of national glory, vaster and grander than anything ever before seen in America.

At the park, Grant and his entourage mounted a giant stage to face a crowd that numbered at least 100,000 and perhaps twice that, packed so densely that it was difficult to move without the aid of police. Boys slack-jawed with excitement perched on statues of the Muses. Bishop Matthew Simpson offered thanks to God for the nation’s prosperity and progress, for the courage of its Founding Fathers, and for the labor-saving machinery that eased the lives of the toiling masses. An orchestra of 150 musicians played “La Marseillaise, “God Save the Queen,” the anthems of Brazil, Germany, Russia, the Netherlands, Spain, and a dozen other powers, followed by a march for the occasion composed by Richard Wagner. A thousand-voiced chorus next sang the official “Centennial Hymn” penned by the aged John Greenleaf Whittier.

At last, the president rose. Grant was a man of modest height, more portly than when he ascended to his office seven years earlier, his chestnut hair beginning to go gray. In big gatherings he was stiff, even shy, his voice difficult to hear from a distance. He gripped his speech in his clenched fist. He felt more beleaguered than ever before, shackled to the country’s wounded economy, grimly watching his effort to save Reconstruction sputter for lack of Northern support, embarrassed by the exposure of venality among his trusted advisors, belittled by defectors from his own party, who sneered at him as incompetent or worse. Wherever he turned some new sump of trouble seemed to be concealed. But he never lacked dignity or sincerity, and he soldiered on.

“One hundred years ago, our country was new and but partially settled,” he began, in that soft voice. To Grant, born in an Ohio cabin in 1822, the frontier now unfolding far west of the Missouri River was no abstraction. “Our necessities have compelled us to chiefly expend our means and time in felling forests, subduing prairies, building dwellings, factories, ships, docks, warehouses, roads, canals, machinery. Most of our schools, churches, libraries & asylums have been established within a hundred years. Burthened by these great primal works of necessity which could not be pretermitted” – that is delayed – “we yet have done what this exhibition will shew in the direction of rivalling older and more advanced nations in law, medicine, and theology – in science, literature, philosophy, and the fine arts. And now fellow citizens, I hope careful examination of what is about to be exhibited to you will not only inspire you with a profound respect for the skill and taste of our friends from other nations, but also satisfy you with the attainments made by our own people during the past one hundred years.”

He then declared the Centennial officially open. Cannon boomed. Tens of thousands of voices cheered. As the presidential party descended from the stage, the great choir roared out Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus.” With Dom Pedro and his family at his side, and senators and congressmen in tow, Grant made his way through the palatial, glass-roofed Machinery Hall, to the foot of the Corliss Engine, the most powerful piece of machinery in the world.

At the direction of its inventor, the famous engineer George Corliss, Grant grasped one lever and Dom Pedro the other. In unison, they pulled and the immense iron walking beams began to move and the great wheel began to spin, setting in motion eight miles of shafts, belts, and spindles connected to the hundreds of lesser machines throughout the hall. Gongs clanged, steam whistles shrilled, cannon again boomed, and church bells rang across the city.

Those who were there felt that the wheel of history itself had turned before their eyes. A reporter for the Philadelphia Times strained for words: “The obedient looms began their round of six months like an ark of machinery set afloat for a voyage to preserve the creations of man.”

The Centennial Exhibition – sometimes called the Exposition, but most often simply the Centennial – was the most ambitious public event in the nation’s history up to then: a spectacle of industrial might, America’s first World’s Fair, an almost magical experience that innumerable visitors would struggle to describe.

Showmanship aside, it marked the country’s first century with an epic celebration of its past and the promise of its future. The roar of the engines and innovations that packed its halls proclaimed that the country could now not only manufacture for itself everything it needed but also sell its burgeoning surpluses to all the world.

The Exposition’s menagerie of new farming equipment – giant tractors, harvesters, mechanical planters – foretold the ecological future of the West, as yet barely settled, as well as the fate of the still potent Native tribes that blocked the way. A plenitude of works by the nation’s artists challenged the world to take American art seriously. A pavilion designed, built, and staffed entirely by women hoped to upend society’s most basic gendered conventions. Colossal displays of new consumer goods teased the eye and tantalized desire.

Apart from its dazzling exhibits, the Centennial embodied a stock-taking of the nation’s past as it charged toward new existential challenges. Throughout its first century the nation had labored to knit together its disparate, mutually distrustful parts, fissured by slavery and bitter disagreement over the powers of the central government. Only with the Civil War’s end could Americans begin to feel assured that republican government would truly prevail. That the United States would survive as a nation no one but the most unforgiving former Confederates now doubted; slavery was gone and states’ rights had (or so it seemed to victorious Yankees) been consigned to the dustbin of lost causes.

If triumphalism was the Centennial’s dominant idiom, beneath its glittering surface it served as a giant kaleidoscopic lens that revealed much about America at one of its most transformative moments, as big money infiltrated government, technology reshaped every-day American life, Black Americans struggled to exercise their hard-won freedom, feminists demanded rights for women, and Native tribes went to war to repel advancing settlement in the West.

In the eyes of both its promoters and ordinary Americans, the Centennial Exhibition stood as a self-conscious metaphor for the nation. It bore testimony to their surging faith in its exceptionalism, its glowing future, its industrial might, its new wealth, its sense of cultural superiority, and an unquestioning belief in its destiny. A memorable poster created for the great fair presented a swaggering Uncle Sam bestriding North America and dandling the earth in his hands.

A century and a half later, the Centennial offers a panoramic window onto the United States at a watershed time in its history, indeed a more revealing one than Americans of that day realized. Unlike most of them, we can also see the darker landscape of social inequities, deepening class conflict, racial shame, and sometimes delusional self-confidence that lay beneath all the triumphalism and hoopla. The Centennial year was only the beginning of an extended period of social and cultural upheaval that would stretch deep into the twentieth century.

Beyond the brass bands, bunting, and soaring oratory lay pressing questions about the direction of the country. What was the United States to be in the century ahead? Would its Centennial herald an era of expanding freedom, or the triumph of white supremacy? Would government be cleansed of corruption, or continue to succumb to it? Would resurgent Native tribes succeed in fending off encroaching settlement on the Great Plains? Would the rising tide of workers’ agitation force corporate power to the bargaining table? Would the once-ascendant Republican Party go down to humiliating defeat barely a decade after its triumph in the Civil War?

In 1876, America was still discovering itself. Eighty-five years earlier, Patrick Henry, fearing for the future of the newly born United States, opined to his protege James Monroe, “Altho’ the Form of Governmt into which my Countrymen determined to place themselves had my Enmity, yet as we are one & all embarked, it is natural to care for the crazy Machine, at least so long as we are out of Sight of a Port to refit.”

Since 1791, the nation had changed dramatically. The pastoral world of small farms and isolated hamlets was rapidly evolving into a modern industrial society where factories produced a dizzying panoply of consumer goods, standards of living had dramatically increased, and railroads were reinventing the speed of people’s lives. But the “crazy machine” was still running stronger than ever, its once-fragile gears now firmly meshed, its output more multitudinous than Henry or any of the other Founders had ever imagined. Roiling, tumultuous, and contentious, it was hurtling on toward a future that the men and women of 1876, optimistic as they so often were, could only hazily see.

Although the Centennial celebrated the spread of mechanization in all aspects of American life, it did so in the midst of massive poverty and unemployment, in the third year of the worst economic depression the United States had yet experienced. With the bloody violence of the 1871 Paris Commune still stark in Americans’ memories, fear of what people were beginning to call “communism” entered popular speech for the first time. Even as Bishop Simpson spoke in the opening ceremony of the improved lives of working men, in Chicago mobs of bricklayers armed with clubs and pistols were marching for higher wages, miners were striking in Ohio, and less than a hundred miles north of Philadelphia, Irish American labor leaders were on trial for their lives.

Everyone knew that the future of the country lay at stake in the coming presidential election, barely six months away. The parties readied themselves for what promised to be an epic battle, with the resurgent Democrats pitted against the scandal-ridden Republicans. Even as Americans proclaimed the superiority of their democracy, they felt the country’s political culture and private morality corroding with a new, hustling greed that infected the very institutions that the Centennial celebrated.

Describing one notoriously shameless magnate, the society reporter Emily Briggs wrote, “Floating in Congressional waters at all hours of the legislative day may be seen the burly form of [Collis] Huntington, the great, huge devil-fish of the railroad combination. He plows the Congressional main, a shark in voracity of plunder, a devil-fish in tenacity of grip. At the beginning of every session, this representative of the great Central Pacific comes to Washington as certain as a member of either branch of Congress. Every weakness of a Congressman is noted, whilst the wily Huntington decides whether the attack shall be made with the weapon of the male or the female kind.”

Revelations of shocking self-dealing tarred prominent members of the administration and Republicans in Congress. Lobbyists handed out wads of cash on the floor of Congress. In Mark Twain’s satirical 1873 novel The Gilded Age, a practiced lobbyist complains, “The fact is that the price is raised so high on a United States Senator now, that it affects the whole market; you can’t get any public improvement through on reasonable terms.”

America also stood at what a later era would call a racial inflection point. The fate of Reconstruction and of the four million Black Americans also hung precariously in the balance. The previous decade had brought them freedom, citizenship, enfranchisement, and new opportunity. But their future depended on the unlikely possibility of a Republican victory at the polls. Unless Republicans somehow overcame the odds, worried John Sherman, brother of General William Tecumseh Sherman and one of the most consequential men in the U.S. Senate, the Southern states would “soon be organized, by violence and intimidation, into a compact political power” – a solid South – that could dominate the national government for generations to come.

The Centennial Exhibition was conceived as a kind of grand theater of national harmony where Americans could come together again in a performance of patriotic self-affirmation. Its promoters predicted that Shiloh, Antietam, and Gettysburg would be forgotten in the remembrance of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill, and visions of a common future. The Exhibition’s organizers paired retired Union and Confederate generals at gala events, and named a relative of Robert E. Lee to read the Declaration of Independence on the Fourth of July. African Americans, too, initially had high hopes: A Black member of Congress, Josiah Walls of Florida, effusively declared that the Centennial would undoubtedly “strengthen the bonds which can unite freemen to their native land, and kindle a blaze of patriotic feeling in whose dazzling light all questions of minor differences and all hurtful recollections of past disagreements will be blotted out.”

But evidence of the shifting public sentiment on race was visible even at the Centennial. Despite plentiful official references to emancipation and equality, Black Americans had been excluded from the Exhibition’s planning and from nearly all the jobs it generated, with the ambiguous, at best, exception of a Southern-themed restaurant, which advertised a band of “old-time darkies” strumming banjos and where Black waiters impersonated slaves. Perhaps significantly, it was the most popular eatery at the Centennial. Frederick Douglass, although invited to sit among the dignitaries on opening day – but not to speak – was initially refused entry to the stage until a U.S. senator personally intervened. Although it was not widely publicized, nativist violence also erupted on opening day, when several Japanese were physically attacked and a Chinese official was nearly stripped of his robes.

In all, some ten million Americans visited the Centennial, about 20 percent of the country’s population, most of them expecting to be inspired by the country’s achievements and hoping to be uplifted by evocations of its history. There were ordinary Americans of all kinds, war veterans from both North and South, presidential candidates, celebrities ranging from P. T. Barnum to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Mark Twain. Foreign visitors numbered in the hundreds of thousands, most famous among them Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil, the first foreign head of state ever to visit the United States, who loved the Exposition so much that he often wandered among the crowds in disguise.

Most visitors were dazzled with what they found. “We are lost in bewilderment,” exclaimed one thrilled young Philadelphian. “The wealth of the world is before us. Where shall we go first? What shall we do? These are the questions one hears on every side.”