In 1893 Adams traveled twice to Chicago, eager to absorb the World’s Columbian Exposition, a six-month celebration commemorating the four-hundred-year anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World. Extolling America’s power and progress barely a generation removed from the Civil War, the fair featured a hastily built plaster “White City” of exhibits that spilled over Jackson Park and into the adjoining Midway Plaisance. An incredible twenty-seven million visitors from around the world passed through its ornate gates. Henry had come to Chicago believing that the city, the industrial capital of the ascendant Midwest, the country’s dominant political region following the collapse of the old southern plantocracy, represented a definite turn in American if not global civilization. It combined the country’s liberal, democratic qualities with an unprecedented technological prowess that pointed toward a new chapter in human history. Meditating some years later on the Exposition’s importance, he wrote, “Chicago asked in 1893 for the first time whether the American people knew where they were driving.… Chicago was the first expression of American thought as unity; one must start there.”1
By “unity” Adams supposed Chicago to be the epitome of the dynamic urban-immigrant-industrial process coming to define the nation’s surging metropolitan areas. The country’s fourth-largest city in 1880, it more than doubled in population to some one million by 1890, second only to New York; fully three-quarters of its residents were the offspring of foreign-born parents. Chicago’s rapid rise, its questionable distinction as the roiling center of newly erected mills and machine shops littered about a thick brick forest of foundries, received a boost when the city, following a fierce competition with New York and St. Louis, won the right to host the Exposition. Ostensibly a quadricentennial of America’s accomplishments, one could easily have interpreted the fair more narrowly as a tribute to nineteenth-century industrial development, or still more precisely as a coming-out party for its host. Barely two decades earlier (1871) the Chicago Fire had ravaged over three square miles of the city, left more than 100,000 homeless, and gutted much of the central business district; some three hundred perished. The October blaze, its exact cause unknown, followed a summer drought and originated near a barn belonging to Catherine and Patrick O’Leary in an area choked with wooden buildings. An enterprising reporter for the Chicago Republican claimed the O’Leary’s cow had kicked over a lantern and started the inferno, though he later owned up to the fib. In the fire’s aftermath arrived the new Chicago, a banking, commerce, and manufacturing phoenix; its buildings, insinuating the architectural imagination of Louis Sullivan, were scaffolded by iron and steel and soared high above whatever indifferent infrastructure had survived the flames. This birth of the skyscraper, a mechanical civilization’s reply to the pyramids of Giza and the medieval Towers of Bologna, announced the city as an avatar of a coming age.
Not everyone, of course, appreciated the extraordinary energy emanating from Chicago. The British writer Rudyard Kipling, like Henry an inveterate global traveler, condemned the city’s emphasis on dollar-chasing in a teasing piece, “How I Struck Chicago, and How Chicago Struck Me: Of Religion, Politics, and Pig-Sticking, and the Incarnation of the City among Shambles,” written shortly after the Exposition ended. “This place is the first American city I have encountered,” he confessed, before hastily adding, “I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.… They told me to go to the Palmer House [hotel] which is a gilded and mirrored rabbit-warren, and there I found a huge hall of tessellate marble, crammed with people talking about money and spitting about everywhere.” The Italian poet and playwright Giuseppe Giacosa also toured America and, much like Adams, saw in Chicago the incarnation of a fresh civilization: “I think that whoever ignores it is not entirely acquainted with our century and of what it is the ultimate expression.” The nature of that expression caused Giacosa to think that “the dominant characteristic of the exterior life of Chicago is violence.”2
Contra such critics as Kipling and Giacosa, the chimeric White City accentuated the efforts of Chicago’s elite to promote its roseate vision of contemporary urban living. The amenities stressed at the Exposition, including incandescent lamps, paved streets, and sewage lines, advertised the kind of urban courtesies enjoyed by the denizens of the city’s North Shore, also known as the Gold Coast. Chicago’s central and southern neighborhoods, by contrast, swelled with industry, butchering yards, and immigrants—these were the “pig-sticking” places referred to by Kipling. But more than putting a shiny gloss on the city, the Exposition overlooked entirely the crucial issue facing Americans in 1893, the year of the crippling financial Panic, which prefaced a great economic depression in all but name. The fallout came following a series of bank failures connected to the overbuilding and overfinancing of railroads. Millions were left unemployed in a four-year slide that merged with an ongoing agricultural recession in the West and South. The fair conspicuously ignored this general unpleasantness, projecting, rather, a vigorous show of confidence, stability, and expansion even as the Panic pointed to a more ambiguous and less secure path. Henry had hoped to see the “future” in Chicago, and perhaps he did in entering this restless city of uncertainties.
Accompanied by the Camerons, Adams first attended the Exposition in May (he called it “my flying visit,” staying only two days) before summering with Lizzie and the Don in England and Switzerland. He returned to Chicago for two weeks in October. Along with a rotating cast of brothers, in-laws, and nieces, Adams and his housekeeper, Maggy Wade, stayed at the swank Hotel Windermere at 56th Street and Cornell Avenue, fronting south on Jackson Park. From that posh trailhead Henry experienced the fair as a series of disassociations and clashing perspectives, with older cultural expressions rapidly giving way to new. “The first astonishment became greater every day,” he later wrote.
That the Exposition should be a natural growth and product of the Northwest offered a step in evolution to startle Darwin; but that it should be anything else seemed an idea more startling still; and even granting it were not,—admitting it to be a sort of industrial, speculative growth and product of the Beaux Arts artistically induced to pass the summer on the shore of Lake Michigan, could it be made to seem at home there? Was the American made to seem at home in it?
One could not hope to find continuity in Chicago, he continued, for the city represented nothing so much as a pronounced “rupture in historical sequence!”3 Eager to identify the forces behind this upending of the old cosmic order, Adams designated the Exposition a celebration of the “watt,” the “ampère,” and the “erg,” units of energy that symbolized, both literally and metaphorically, the harnessing of hitherto untapped physical and chemical resources.
Though Henry favored rural Quincy over Boston, marveled at the coherence of medieval civilization, and eagerly sampled the South Seas’ “primitive” island societies, he nevertheless thrilled at the fragmented modern urban experience evident in Chicago. He described the Midway Plaisance to Hay as a “sweet repose,” an enigma or puzzle that showed off so much of America, if Americans were willing to notice. “I revelled in all its fakes and frauds,” he admitted to his fellow Heart, “all its wickedness that seemed not to be understood by our innocent natives, and all its genuineness which was understood still less.”4 Presumably the fair’s authentic nature could be found in the dynamos and steam engines that Henry had discovered in one of its vast exhibition halls. These impressive machines, as inscrutable in their clean, monotonous routine as the Adams Memorial, pointed to an American future far removed from the simple agrarian republic, now in its death throes. The “fakes” and “frauds,” by contrast, included scale-size productions of Columbus’s three ships, the (impeccably scrubbed) Niña, Pinta, and Santa María, which docked at Jackson Park’s south lagoon while an actor playing Columbus, standing before kneeling monks and San Salvador natives, reenacted the moment of European contact with the New World. They were, to use Adams’s category, “phonies” in that they venerated a buried past characterized by the kind of pioneer individualism and small-scale economies that no longer enlivened America’s robber baron republic. He thought the greater emphasis in Chicago on new forms of material power, by contrast, to be “honest.”
In a letter to Lucy Baxter, an old acquaintance, Henry sounded like the perfect modernist, taking in with equanimity the White City’s tangle of sights and impressions, equal to the task of digesting the education it had to offer. “Chicago delighted me,” he wrote, “because it was just as chaotic as my own mind, and I found my own preposterous state of consciousness reflected and exaggerated at every turn. A pure white temple, on the pure blue sea, with an Italian sky, all vast and beautiful as the world never saw it before, and in it the most astounding, confused, bewildering mass of art and industry, without a sign that there was any connection, relation or harmony or understanding of the relations of anything anywhere.” One can catch several sides of irony in Henry’s embrace of Chicago’s “delights,” but what stands out in this sumptuous evocation is his awareness of the city’s creatively disruptive nature reflecting his own sense of displacement as a colonial figure in a modern framework. Having survived the Adams family’s irrelevance by inventing for himself a new career as a cosmopolitan, and conjoining that cosmopolitanism with the fabrication of a posthumous life, Henry had already released certain inherited cultural views, aspirations, and anchors. He could appreciate Chicago’s flux because he felt it in himself. “I have long recognized the same chaos in my own mind,” he told Baxter, “and know it when I see it, while [the Exposition’s visitors] probably feel it for the first time.”5
Favorably observing the fair’s disordered “mind,” Henry discovered in it multiple meanings, though he took from his wanderings along the Midway Plaisance a firm conviction of what it ultimately meant. Chicago was no aberration, no commotion of disconnected exhibits. An underlying harmony gave reason and purpose to the ceaseless energy that escaped from its exhibition halls. These displays proclaimed the intensity and chaos of Chicago—and of America, a socially, economically, and spiritually mobile nation of constant unrest and inevitable fracture. In writing his great History, Adams had stressed the country’s unending evolution beyond its primitive colonial roots. The narrative concluded with a review of the War of 1812, a far more decisive conflict than customarily understood, so he argued, as it ushered in “a new episode in American history.” That fresh chapter, registering the decisive break from European “church, traditions, and prejudices,” led to an unprecedented phase in human history—it led to Chicago.6