“Disposing of Modernity” by Rebecca Graff

If time travel ever becomes a thing, the Chicago World’s Fair held in 1893 might be one of the leading attractions for time travelers. Here was an exposition, spread across almost 700 acres in Jackson Park, some seven miles from Chicago’s Loop, that sold 27 million tickets in its six-month run.Some 200 buildings were erected that included displays from nations across the world, public comfort stations, soda pavilions, and restaurants. You had electricity and flush toilets for all to use.“Add to all of this an elevated train that looped around the fairgrounds, the sounds of tourists talking mixed with band concerts, sights of ‘Little Egypt’ performing the danse du ventre, or children doing gymnastics in the model kindergarten, smells of baking bread from the French bakery exhibit or beer and wurst from the German Village, and one starts to get a small sense of the teeming character of the 1893 fair,” noted Rebecca Graff, an anthropology professor at Lake Forest College.Graff recalled a teacher telling her grad-school class years earlier that the Chicago fair site was “the center of the world” 100 years ago. That motivated her to find out what was left of the great fair often cited as a watershed moment in the development of modern, industrial American society.The result is captured in Disposing of Modernity: The Archaeology of Garbage and Consumerism During Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair, Graff's book that details some of what lay behind (or under) White City.To fully appreciate the 1893 event in Chicago, one must first understand the concept of a world’s fair. Between 1865 and 1925, 360 million people attended world’s fairs in Europe, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. “Fairs were venues within which to display the growing and changing material world,” noted Graff.The United States, and Chicago, in particular, were pulsing with power in 1893. While the U.S. frontier may have closed (Frederick Jackson Turner made that declaration in Chicago that year), the country was flexing its railroad and steam muscle in the era that became known as the Gilded Age. Chicago, 20 years removed from the great fire, wanted to show its resurgence at the fair—not only as a meatpacking and transportation center, but also as a city with world-class architects such as Louis Sullivan and a young draftsman named Frank Lloyd Wright.The fair saw the introduction of the frankfurter that became known as the Chicago hot dog. White City was also criticized by Frederick Douglass, then ambassador to Haiti, for excluding African Americans from a more prominent role at the fair. It was a transformative event. Six months later, it was gone.That kind of conspicuous disposal, the disposing of modernity, is one of the stories of White City.