Transcript
The Gold Key
May 1, 1893
Promontory Summit, Utah Territory May 10, 1869
Western Union operator at Promontory DONE.
Almost twenty-four years after DONE, another telegraph key sat on a table in Chicago.
It was an ordinary telegraph key. Except it was gold, and the button was ivory.
Grover Cleveland As by a touch the machinery that gives life to this vast exposition is now set in motion…
Across the grounds, the circuit started a giant steam engine in Machinery Hall.
Fountains leapt. Flags unrolled along the rooftops. A cloth dropped from a gilded Republic, sixty-five feet tall.
This was the World's Columbian Exposition, for the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's voyage. It opened a year late.
People called it the White City. Almost none of it was built to last.
That summer, in a room downtown, a young historian said the frontier was gone. And with it, the first period of American history. Was he right?
The Line
1890–July 12, 1893
Every ten years, the census marked where settlement thinned to two people per square mile. That frontier line crept west for a century.
In 1890, the line broke into islands, and the Census Office said so.
Frederick Jackson Turner …at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line.
A new hall on Michigan Avenue, built for the fair's congresses. Hot. Frederick Jackson Turner, thirty-one, of Wisconsin, had a paper to read.
Several papers came first. Some listeners had spent the afternoon at Buffalo Bill's Wild West. They had already seen the frontier that day.
Frederick Jackson Turner The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.
Each new frontier, he argued, rebuilt settlers as practical, inventive, individualist and, above all, democratic Americans.
…the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.
Frederick Jackson Turner …the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.
The room was unmoved. Within a generation, it was one of the most influential essays American historians had written.
Turner said the frontier made America. This unit pointed at the railroad, the factory and the city.
Test it three ways. Evidence can corroborate a claim, qualify it, or make you modify it.
Dusk
a composite evening, September 1893
Now test him.
Here's where this unit happened.
Almost every story in this unit left something at this fair.
An evening in September 1893. It costs fifty cents to get in. The fair also sells its own fifty-cent coin. For a dollar.
Carry Turner's sentence with you. At each lamp there's a piece of evidence. File it as change, continuity or both, and watch what it does to his claim.
Look at his sentence now. It's covered in your red pencil. That's an argument getting better.
Two Hundred Sixty-Four Feet
the same night, September 1893
Daniel Burnham, who ran construction, wanted something to top the Eiffel Tower. A Pittsburgh bridge builder named George Ferris answered with a wheel.
Two hundred sixty-four feet high. Thirty-six cars, sixty riders each. Fifty cents a ride, on top of the fifty at the gate.
From up here, the change is easy to see. Most of these lamps run on Westinghouse's alternating current.
On the Midway's edge is the University of Chicago, opened last October with Rockefeller's money. Carnegie called that kind of giving the Gospel of Wealth.
Now look past the lights. That orange glow to the south is Illinois Steel's South Works. Farther on lies Pullman's company town.
West, the Union Stock Yards. North, a city of a million, where three in four people are immigrants or their children.
In these years prices fell and real wages rose. More children worked for wages. The gap between the richest and everyone else grew faster.
From 1870 to 1890 the population grew by more than half. Railroad track tripled. Steel output grew about sixtyfold. And most Americans still lived in the country.
Henry Adams Chicago asked in 1893 for the first time the question whether the American people knew where they were driving.
Here's one answer. Industrialization changed America more than the frontier ever did: how people worked, where they lived, what they bought.
It changed much less about who held power. Race, sex and conquest still decided who shared in it.
That's complexity: what changed, what didn't, and for whom. Your version may use different evidence. It should.
Frederick Jackson Turner …the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise.
Down on the Midway, a round building holds a painted volcano, Kīlauea. Its promoter, Lorrin Thurston, helped overthrow Hawaii's queen that January.
Staff
October 1893–July 1894
The fair was supposed to close with a grand ceremony on October 30. It never happened.
Carter H. Harrison
Two nights before, a man shot Mayor Carter Harrison dead. He believed the mayor owed him a city job. Twelve years earlier, a disappointed office-seeker had killed President Garfield.
That winter, jobless men slept on the stone floors of police stations and City Hall. Some found shelter in the empty palaces.
In May 1894, Pullman's workers struck. Their wages had been cut by about a quarter. Their rents hadn't.
In July, fourteen months after he pressed the gold key, President Cleveland sent federal troops into Chicago.
On the evening of July 5, fire broke out in the empty fairgrounds. Nobody ever proved who started it.
Most of the Court of Honor burned that night. A huge crowd watched from the shore, as if it were one last show.
The white skin was staff, plaster and jute fiber painted to look like marble. It fell away in sheets. Underneath, the big halls' steel frames still stood.
By morning, the palaces were charred wood, blackened plaster and bent steel.
Above the ruins, the gilded Republic still stood.
Twain and Warner called this era the Gilded Age: a thin coat of gold over something cheaper. The White City was a Gilded Age you could walk through.
But the steel under the plaster was real. So was the question the fair never answered: who was all of this for?