VISITING CHICAGO IN THE SUMMER OF 1893, A RECENTLY married couple from Stockton, California, or a retired schoolteacher from Paterson, New Jersey, could have beheld the most spectacular sight ever displayed by Americans on their own continent. Covering over six hundred acres, replete with Japanese gardens, flower-lined waterways, and restaurants with seating for seven thousand, the World’s Columbian Exposition hosted an unfathomable 65,000 displays. The fairgrounds, according to the Century magazine, “flamed with the human energy that handed the torch of civilization across an ocean” and “touched the romantic sense of the whole wide world.”
Ostensibly, the exposition commemorated the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the New World, yet it also tacitly celebrated America’s transition from a mainly agricultural society to an industrial powerhouse, and provided a diversion for the innumerable laborers who had been displaced or benumbed by that process. The exposition’s planners sought to endow all Americans with a sense of their common fate and pride in their global ascendancy. Eager to be feted, distracted, and inspired, Americans flocked to Chicago, and not only from California and New Jersey but from forty-three territories and states, a total of 27.5 million attendees.
Arriving, as did most visitors, via elevated train, the Stockton couple and Paterson’s erstwhile schoolmarm could proceed eastward into the magnificent White City with its two hundred buildings and Beaux-Arts halls, the tallest of which was topped only by the engineer George Ferris’s 264-foot-high wheel. From there, they could stroll through pavilions dedicated to progress in transportation, manufacturing, and electricity, while others showcased the cultures of twenty-three foreign countries and the accomplishments of American women. They could thrill at the sight of a map of the United States made entirely of pickles or at the statue of a knight inventively sculpted from prunes. They could peep at moving pictures through Thomas Edison’s newfangled kinetiscope, shrink before Krupp’s quarter-million-pound cannon—the world’s largest—or gape at the latest innovation in “humane” capital punishment, the electric chair. Relaxing on the banks of a willow-shaded lagoon or on the classical colonnade overlooking Lake Michigan, they could delight in the latest American snacks: Cracker Jacks and Shredded Wheat, hamburgers and Aunt Jemima’s pancakes. Later, after sunset, they could gaze in wonderment as some 200,000 incandescent bulbs, powered by 127 dynamos, encased the White City in light.
Instead of heading into the fairgrounds proper, the tourists could veer north toward an elongated park known as the Midway Plaisance. Here, more prosaic forms of entertainment awaited, such as carnival games, freak shows, and a Wild West extravaganza starring Buffalo Bill Cody, the sharpshooter Anne Oakley, and over two hundred U.S. cavalrymen and Indians.1 Further along the Midway lay the most sensational attraction of all. Bypassing the balloon rides, the reproductions of St. Peter’s Basilica and Blarney Castle, ignoring the barkers and the hawkers, the Californians and the New Jerseyan would enter—in downtown Chicago—the Middle East.
Horatio Algeria
More than a few Americans in 1893 recalled with enchantment the Egyptian and Moroccan pavilions at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia sixteen years earlier. Many would have welcomed the chance to view them again, to reexperience that mystique and frisson. But for Sol Bloom, who was only a child in 1876, the inspiration for bringing the Middle East to America sprang not from Philadelphia’s fair but from an Algerian revue in Paris.
The youngest of six children born to Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Poland, Bloom was raised in San Francisco and received almost no formal education. At age seven he started working in a brush factory, but soon branched out into other occupations—advertising, real estate, and, most prosperously, the theater. By nineteen, he was already a wealthy man, and decided to take a European tour, his very first vacation. Visiting the French capital in 1889, Bloom wandered open-mouthed through the International Exhibition, the largest fair ever mounted, with its displays of technological and natural marvels. None of these wonders impressed him more, however, than those supposedly imported from the Middle East. French engineers had meticulously re-created Cairo streets—even the buildings were painted to look dirty—and a labyrinthine Algerian Village. Bloom was awestruck. “I came to realize that a tall, skinny chap from Arabia with a talent for swallowing swords expressed a culture which to me was on a higher plane than the one demonstrated by a group of earnest Swiss peasants who passed their days making cheese and milk chocolate,” he recalled some sixty years later. “The spiritual intensity of the performance exceeded the emotional power of a pre-Renaissance tapestry.”
The experience tweaked not only Bloom’s intellect but also his commercial instincts. “I knew that nothing like these dancers, acrobats, glass-eaters, and scorpion swallowers had ever been seen in the Western Hemisphere, and I was sure that I could make a fortune with them in the United States.” At five feet six, a nonimposing figure whose oversized smile and nose seemed to compress his squinty eyes, unknown and utterly ignorant of French, Bloom seemed unlikely to succeed in fin-de-siècle Paris. Yet the same persuasive powers that had made him rich in America enabled him to secure a two-year exclusive option on the Algerian Village for a mere one thousand dollars. The contract provided for a world tour, but Bloom had no intention of exploiting it. “The rest of the globe would have to wait until I had brought the Algerian Village to America.”
Inducing the French to part with the Algerians proved less difficult for Bloom than persuading the august heads of the Chicago exposition to host them. The organizers saw the Midway Plaisance as a cultural promenade, not a carnival arcade, and entrusted its development to a Harvard ethnologist. “To have made this unhappy gentleman responsible for…entertainment,” remembered Bloom, “was about as intelligent a decision as…to make Albert Einstein manager of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus.” Nevertheless, after his appointment as the fair’s entertainment director, Bloom was well placed to convince the overseers that the village could be both edifying and profitable. He further proposed that not only Algerians be exhibited but also Egyptians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Sudanese, and Turks. These would all be showcased in a “Mohammedan world” situated in the Midway’s center, just a short distance from the Ferris wheel.2
Over the course of eighty years, beginning with Mordecai Noah’s appointment as consul in Tunis and Edwin De Leon’s in Egypt, through the recent ambassadorships of Oscar Straus and Solomon Hirsch to the Porte, the United States had viewed its Jewish citizens as a natural bridge to the Middle East. Now, though his sole impetus was commercial, another American Jew was fulfilling a similar purpose. In contrast to his coreligionists serving abroad, Bloom had no interest in projecting his country’s power into the Middle East or in safeguarding the agents of American faith. His objective, rather, lay in making the cultures and wonders of the Middle East available to vast numbers of Americans, enabling them to access their dreams.
The Midway’s Middle East
The exposition formally opened, to international acclaim, on May 1, 1893, with an inaugurating speech by Grover Cleveland. Many of the fair’s structures had yet to be completed, but the Middle Eastern section of the Midway was already teeming. At the Algerian Village, the president was greeted by dozens of young women in brazenly diaphanous pantaloons and brightly embroidered vests, who lowered their veils as he passed. “I doubt very much whether anything resembling it was ever seen in Algeria,” he later confessed, “but I was not at the time concerned with trifles.” Neither were the bulk of Americans who swiftly flooded the site. Indifferent to the real Middle East, their main concern lay in confirming their myths about the region, the illusions spawned by A Thousand and One Arabian Nights and the images painted by Irving, Melville, and Twain.
In Chicago, on the Midway, those myths fabulously leapt to life. Approaching the concourse, our California newlyweds and New Jersey retiree would already glimpse the tips of minarets, silken pennants, and multicolored tents and hear what one disdainful visitor from Virginia, a Reverend Eggleston, called “the strange music of a foreign tambourine, and the hideous yelling (music, so-called) of non-American girls.” Soon they would encounter a scene similar to that first described by John Ledyard more than a hundred years earlier: meandering streets teeming with exotically dressed Levantines—Arabs, Copts, Armenians, and Jews—all yammering in guttural tongues. Shopkeepers in white turbans and gilded shoes hawked carpets, swords, and other “authentic” mementos, while hooded women balanced water jugs on their heads. “Memories of childhood stories trooped before us, of Joseph and his brethren, of Pharaoh’s daughter and her maids bending over the babe Moses,” wrote a tourist who referred to herself only as Mrs. Mark Stevens. “With a little stretch of the imagination our dream of the Orient was realized.”
Spellbound, Mrs. Stevens felt little compulsion to investigate how many of these natives in fact hailed from the Middle East and how many were merely actors culled from Chicago’s ethnic communities. The Century correspondent Gustave Kobbe was not so complacent, however, asserting that “the Midway Plaisance is probably the greatest collection of fakes the world has ever seen.” One berobed figure in particular, Kobbe claimed, was the “greatest fakir [a Muslim mystic]” of them all. “I am proud to say he was an American.”
Some exhibits did, in fact, employ Middle Easterners, such as the sixty-five women, men, and children recruited from various Ottoman provinces to populate the Turkish Pavilion. They, along with an array of kiosks, mosques, and quaint Istanbul-style houses, helped generate an otherworldly, Oriental atmosphere through which Americans could wander, gawking at a sultaness’s solid silver bed or a “Wild East show” staged by Bedouin lancers on steeds. Alternatively, they could browse through the forty souvenir shops at the Grand Bazaar, take in a medieval Turkish play with simultaneous English translation, or smoke a water pipe at a café chantant while sipping Mecca coffee or “Turkish Temperance Drinks,” such as orange juice and lemonade.
The Turkish Pavilion, produced by another Jewish entrepreneur, Joseph Levy, proved immensely popular. So did the Moorish Palace, with its hall of mirrors and its wax museum of horrors, the Persian Tent, and the Kabyle (North African tribal) House. More alluring than all of these curios, though, was Cairo Street. Like its Parisian predecessor, this exhibit was reconstructed in painstaking detail, though not by Frenchmen but by a Hungarian, Max Herz, the Egyptian khedive’s personal architect. It featured latticed windows and closed wooden balconies, scalloped water fountains and a souk with sixty booths, a replica of the Qayt Bey Mosque, and the house of one Gamal El Din El Yahbi, a fictitious Egyptian merchant. Real Egyptians were also brought in to reenact scenes from daily life—180 of them dressed up as dervishes, tent makers, beggars, and fortune-tellers. Donkeys, too, were imported, as well as dogs, monkeys, and, of course, camels. The latter, for fifty cents, could be ridden. “Such a jaunt was honey for lovers, but gall and wormwood for prudes and fat people,” recounted one rider who had straddled the hump.
For those with less adventurous inclinations, Cairo Street also offered ornate Egyptian temples from the pharaonic age, copies of ancient tombs, and even mummies. The cumulative effect was hypnotic. “Cairo was strikingly resplendent when bathed in the golden rays of the departing sun,” Mrs. Stevens swooned. “[W]hen…the cold, gray moonlight shone upon its quaint architecture and grave-looking people, the visitors felt they were indeed in Egypt.”3
The “Mohammedan world” exhibits also spurred another, more invidious type of revelry, one that Western men had long derived from the Middle East. Both Cairo Street and the Algerian Village were equipped with sumptuous theaters, and the Persian Tent had its Palace of Eros, in which women clothed in so-called Oriental dress—translucent skirts, bare midriffs, a profusion of bracelets and beads—performed snake and candle dances to the rataplan of tomtoms and flutes. “This high art dancing of the Nile consisted of distorting and knotting the muscles, reminding us of a cat in a fit,” Mrs. Stevens wrote, recalling how one of the dancers “flew into a rage at the audience…threatening the musicians and also the audience.” Yet the violence these entertainers contrived paled before the wantonness of the belly dancers or, as Sol Bloom continentally called them, danseuses de ventre.
Since these shows appealed mostly to men, the California groom would separate from his now irritated bride, leaving her, together with the indignant schoolteacher, outside of the theater. Within, he could ogle “splendid specimens of oriental beauty” executing suggestive contortions of their sporadically clad bodies. “It is the coarse animal passion of the East, not the chaste sentiment of Christian lands,” remarked one onlooker, after viewing the “Dance of Love,” a solo. “Every motion of her body is in the illustration of her animalism.” And of the performers few were as feral as the Syrian-born Fahred Mahzar, the coquettishly nicknamed Little Egypt, whose “genuine native muscle dance” was said to “deprive [a man] of a peaceful night’s rest for years to come.” Accompanied by a minor-key ditty that Bloom fingered out on a piano—later replayed by countless cartoon snake charmers—Little Egypt would mesmerize her male audiences with her sinuous, sensuous gyrations. As another breathless spectator observed:
Now she revolves and turns, her face assuming a dreamy smile, her painted eyes half closed, her white teeth showing between lips made redder and fuller by art…. [H]er movements are snake-like and vulgar, and she sinks lower and lower, wriggling, twisting, jerking, her face half veiled with her handkerchief, until she almost touches the stage.
Not all the spectators were similarly titillated, however. Anthony Comstock, the plump and fulsomely whiskered founder of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, the congressionally sanctioned burner of A Thousand and One Arabian Nights and hundreds of similarly “obscene” books, demanded that such performances be outlawed. The aged Julia Ward Howe denounced the belly dance as “simply horrid” and as a “most deforming movement of the whole abdominal and lumbar region,” and concluded, “We thought it indecent.” Yet, the majority of fairgoers found nothing objectionable about Little Egypt and preferred to fault her detractors’ prudishness. Poking fun at Howe, the Chicago Tribune wondered “whether the apprehensions of the good ladies were due to infringements of morality or to the anticipation that the performers may bring on an attack of peritonitis if they persist in their contortions.”4
THE MIDDLE EASTERN pavilions proved to be the most popular attraction of the fair, drawing more than 60 percent more admissions than its next highest moneymaker, the Ferris wheel. Approximately 2.5 million people ambled down Cairo Street, and, according to the exposition’s Final Official Report, nearly fifty thousand of them rode on camels. For many of those tourists, this proved to be a culturally stimulating—and comfortingly sterile—experience. “The denizens of the Midway…give the observer an opportunity to investigate these barbarous and semi-civilized people without the unpleasant accompaniments of travel through their countries and contact with them,” New York’s senator Chauncey M. Depew harrumphed. For others, such as the effusive Mrs. Stevens, the Midway was “the model of the New Jerusalem,” curative and spiritually uplifting. For most Americans, however, presumably including our exemplary teacher and reunited husband and wife, the encounter with Chicago’s Middle East was simply, unequivocably fun. “We were all knocked silly,” John Hay, the usually saturnine secretary of state, tittered. “It beats the brag so far out of sight that even Chicago is dumb.”
Sol Bloom had every reason to exult. “The crowds poured in,” he exulted. “I had a gold mine.” Building on his Chicago-earned reputation, Bloom would soon move to New York, become a congressman, and, in that capacity, play a prominent role in America’s relations with the Middle East. Looking back, Bloom regretted only that the belly dance, which he considered “a masterpiece of rhythm and beauty,” later degenerated into burlesque and that he failed to copyright the snake charmer’s song. He also missed the company of the Algerian who served as his personal bodyguard during the fair, a swarthy giant named Archie.
The Chicago exposition lasted only six months, but Bloom’s recreation of the Middle East—“Haroun al-Raschid’s new capital,” the Century now called it—would resonate for decades. The dance de ventre, renamed and further eroticized as the “hoochy koochy,” became a Vaudeville standard, and Little Egypt an off-color sensation, giving rise to dozens of imposters and several high society scandals. A generation of Americans danced to the “Cairo Street Waltz” or sang “She Never Saw the Streets of Cairo,” while children, appropriating Bloom’s “Oriental” tune, sniggered, “There’s a place in France where the ladies wear no pants.” Encouraged by the Midway’s success, future world’s fairs would also feature Middle Eastern pavilions, and the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus presented pageants with such seductive names as “Persia—The Most Gorgeous Oriental Display Ever Seen in Any Land” and “Orientally Splendid and Weirdly Romantic Spectacular Pilgrimage to Mecca.”5 For perpetuating Middle Eastern illusions, a visit to any of these attractions could easily rival a reading of A Thousand and One Arabian Nights, further imprinting those myths on America’s imagination.
MYTHMAKING MAY have been the Midway’s major accomplishment, but the fair’s organizers never lost sight of their original, educational goal. Along with more mundane amusements, they sponsored nearly six thousand lectures on an ambitious range of economic, social, ethical, and religious topics. Many of the nation’s foremost speakers participated, including the Reverned T. De Witt Talmage and a young Princeton professor, Woodrow Wilson, who addressed the need for university reform. William Blackstone also attended, circulating his memorial in favor of a Jewish state in Palestine as well as his newest proposal for resolving international disputes through arbitration. Mark Twain was invited to talk about his fiction, but was confined to his bed with a stomach ailment. Ultimately, the series’ most significant lecture had nothing to do with education, or even with fantasy and faith, but rather with the course of American power.
“He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased,” declared Frederick Jackson Turner, a thirty-two-year-old historian from Harvard. Rather, the “restless, nervous energy” that had driven Americans to conquer their own frontier, “that coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness,” would spur them to subdue even vaster territories overseas. Though slight, almost boyish looking, Turner sounded brawny in his call for an aggressive, unambivalent imperialism. That injunction clashed directly with the appeals of Twain and the members of his Anti-Imperialist League, who kept urging the United States to distinguish itself from rapacious Europe and pursue more enlightened, altruistic policies. Yet, as the country crossed into the new, twentieth century and sought to extend its influence throughout the Middle East and other areas, Turner’s voice, not Twain’s, would accompany it. “American energy,” it proclaimed, “will continually demand a wider field for its exercise.”6