A whole lot of Americans visited the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, with around three-quarters of a million visitors on the opening day alone and 27 million during its six-month run. Unfortunately, there’s no way to estimate what proportion of the US or global population visited the Fair – but that opening day’s visitor ticket sales covered more than 1% of the population at the time, if the US government’s statistical record is anything like correct.
The astonishing number of developments that first came to public attention there mean that it’s realistic to look at it as one of the prime locations of the birth of the twentieth century. The (arguably) first real life serial killer appeared here, and other cultural firsts included or are claimed to include breakfast cereal, aerosol spray, Scott Joplin’s ascent to fame, the first choral eisteddfod outside Wales, moving sidewalks, the Ferris wheel, the fax machine and the fitted kitchen.
With this much going on in one place, it was inevitable that there’d be a camel or two around.
Not in the central educational displays and exhibits on the history of civilization and suchlike, however. America wasn’t ready to acknowledge the central place of the camel in moving most of the stuff that enabled the development of civilization. Given the place of the camel as a symbol of the Arab and Muslim East, it probably never will be. The black and female populations of America were also largely excluded from the educational exhibits that were the explicit rationale of the show. Frederic Douglas, who had been the US ambassador to Haiti, used an appearance in Chicago that year to let America know what he thought of its racism: