How often do you think about the 1893 World's Fair?

Of all the displeasures that the Trump Administration has brought upon the District of Columbia, the most peculiar was the dinky little fairgrounds thrown up on the National Mall this past July. Crafted from the finest styrofoam and vinyl that misdirected donations can buy, its design unmistakably evoked the otherworldly classical ensembles of the 1893 World's Fair and its imitators. In some ways, the choice is intuitive. The World's Columbian Exposition was an exuberant expression of American wealth, power, and identity that cultural creators have returned to with fascination again and again. Make America Great Again, right? But on the other hand, how did a festival that lasted only six months lodge itself so deeply in the American psyche? Why did we rebuild it in miniature on the National Mall? Why has it become a feature of more than one conspiracy theory about a suppressed glorious past? Why is its discernment invoked on every can of Pabst Blue Ribbon? Have we always been thinking about this plaster pop-up advertisement for American majesty? The answer to all of these questions is... stranger than I had thought. Whether thinking back to 1893 or 1993, what draws us to an event, story, or image depends less on the context of the events than the context we inhabit. As a result, we interpret—or reimagine—the past differently from our predecessors. And I think the lingering memory of the World's Columbian Exposition shows how it's from these reimaginings, not neutral facts, that we reshape the world. A New and Improved Jerusalem One aspect of the fair that no historian will dispute is that, like the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park (1993), it blew people's minds. Raves about the Exposition had begun even before it opened in May 1893 and continued well past its closure in October of that same year. Articles, telegrams, and diaries all testified to its wonder. For years after, both licensed and bootleg merchandise sold well, cluttering parlors into the new century. Writers of all stripes have catalogued the diversity of its appeal. For a population that had only just become majority urban, Chicago was an attraction in and of itself. Down in Hyde Park, the glass-roofed exhibit halls offered unbeatable publicity to manufacturers in an advertising environment of catalogues and newsprint. Over at the fair's Midway, visitors delighted in its carnival attractions while its ethnographic displays shook assumptions about humanity. More than any of that, however, what lingered longer in people's memory was the central complex of the fair. Known officially as the "Court of Honor," and colloquially as the "White City," it was an ensemble of monumental plaster facades that shone in the daytime and glowed after dark in a lavish display of Westinghouse electric light—still radiant with the shock of the new. Hundreds of organizations held their annual meetings behind its facades and nearly a third of all Americans visited. Even the White City had its dark side.It is not possible to trace every path that crossed in the White City. Some people were wowed and went home with the merch. Others were transformed. One such pilgrim was a journalist named Charles Mulford Robinson. In the 1897 official history the fair, he described the experience of entering the Court of Honor as something like an ego death: The faculties were all alert; he forgot himself or he felt the limits of his own personality slipping away, extending widely, boundlessly, until the whole scene was in his own soul. That was the first, unanalyzed impression of the Fair; not the impression merely of the artist, the architect, or the poet, but of the everyday person, sounding infinite depths whose existence he never had known before.He was far from alone in seeing the otherworldly in the design. In 1895, Frances Hogson Burnett, better known as the author of The Secret Garden, published a children's parable, Two Little Pilgrims' Progress, A Story of the City Beautiful. The short book follows two orphan children as they visit the fair while reading the 17th century Christian allegory Pilgrim's Progress. In Burnett's retelling, the spiritual journey is a physical one. The Celestial City that serves as Pilgrim's aim in the fable, it turns out, was right there on the shores of Lake Michigan, reached for reasonable fare. Contemporary reviews of the book were mixed. None that I have found, however, objected to the comparison she made between this for-profit festival and actual literal Heaven. The Peristyle of the Court of Honor, from Official Views Of The World's Columbian Exposition by C. D. Arnold and H. D. Higinbotham.On to the next one Here's another question. How much do you think about the Barcelona Summer Olympics? Woodstock '94? Michael Jackson's halftime show at Super Bowl XXVII?Each of these brief events from roughly thirty years ago was deeply influential in its own time and on the industries they were part of. Yet I think it's safe to say that they don't hold our memory as well as media from 1993 like Whitney Houston's rendition of I Will Always Love You or Stephen Ambrose's A Band of Brothers. Events are definitionally less tangible and less accessible. The memory itself persists more in more the fragments of souvenirs. The historian David Burg counted over a dozen novels featured the Fair as a setting or even plot device over the following decades. Some reveled in its heyday; others frolicked in its ruins. In most cases, it was a setting or even a plot device, not the character that Burnett made it.Colorized engraving from The Book of the Fair, by H. H. Bancroft, 1893On the other side of the First World War I, the only people who seem particularly interested in the fair are urban planners. Seeing it as the spark for their movement, they approached it with historical, rather than immediate, reverence. Like the general public, their eyes were focused on the unfolding of modernity. As charted by economist Robert Gordon, the technology that had seemed magical in 1893 grew increasingly mundane. Its aesthetics, on the other hand, looked quainter with every year. Not only was there no jazz at the Columbian Exposition, there wasn't even ragtime. When Chicago again hosted a World's Fair in 1933, it invoked its predecessor primarily to emphasize just how far they had come in two generations. Perhaps the clearest illustration of the Exposition's faded mystique is its absence in the artistic medium that dominated the 20th century. From the establishment of the first studio in Hollywood in 1912 until 2017, only a single major motion picture covered the Fair—and even then, it dramatizes the Midway, not the White City. It's a biopic of skimpresario Florenz Ziegfeld featuring Myrna Loy as Billie Burke, who herself was about to achieve immortality for introducing the world to another fantasy city—this one, Emerald. Honestly, I was surprised at how thin the fair's top-line cultural impact was for most of the 20th century. Not that I did a truly exhaustive search, but outside of Chicago it was a topic for the history books and apologetic statements by urban planners, especially when compared to the city's dark side. Only PBR, it seems, held to the faith. Frame from Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on EarthThe dream of the 90s was the dream of the 90sThings changed in the 1990s. The centennial of the Fair in 1993 summoned a host of books, local TV documentaries, and exhibits. Still, these might not have added up to much, if a cartoonist named Chris Ware hadn't broken his legs. Unable to walk for weeks, he read up on Chicago's history and began to incorporate some of this background into the strip he ran in the local alt weekly (what could be more 90s than that?). Definitively published in 2000, Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, features multiple sequences set at the fair. More so than almost any work since Burnett's fable, it shows the White City as a space of unmatched wonder. The ornate structures fill page after panel and from every angle. Ware's style draws heavily from severe technical drawing and slick advertisements. Yet rather than dulling the grandeur of the Roman designs, it makes them look Platonic—celestial even. Ultimately, though, it looks like the revival of interest in the World's Fair was actually the work of the Devil: 2003's The Devil in the White City. Hanging 300 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, Erik Larson's narrative nonfiction book revived not only the magic of the Court of Honor, but also the motif from 19th-century works that the rest of Chicago was a place of lethal danger. The moment by Lake Michigan had an alluring ambiguity, like CK One.Others saw it too. Novels, movies, shows, video games, memes: every medium and every genre has found its way to the Court of Honor since then. It been a setting for both Thomas Pynchon and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it was namechecked by Sufjan Stevens, and it inspired the richly disturbing first person shooter BioShock Infinite. Of all the media that has riffed on Fair since hipsters started drinking PBR in Williamsburg, this game best tackles the themes that historians had been uncovering beneath the great plaster facades: Christian nationalism, racism, and patriarchy—all on the eve of Ferguson and Gamergate, organic cultural events that, like the Chicago Fair, continue to shape our culture even if they aren't on our minds.In-game advertisement for the floating city of Columbia in BioShock Infinite.One advantage the game had over any of the novels about it was that it is a visual medium. Architecture photographs better than it reads. So perhaps it's not a surprise that we also see a simultaneous revival of wonder around the fair on the basis of photographs alone. The internet made sharing image across the globe incomparably easy. With this came a collapse in context. A scan posted by the Art Institute of Chicago with academic reserve might get shared on Reddit with Millennial