The 1904 St. Louis World's Fair

Picture twelve hundred acres of swamp and thicket on the western edge of St. Louis. Now picture fifteen hundred buildings rising out of it. Seventy-five miles of roads and walkways. One building, the Palace of Agriculture, covering twenty acres all by itself.

Twenty acres. That's one building?

One building. People said you couldn't even glance at the whole fair in less than a week. And here's the thing that gets me... almost all of it was designed to be destroyed.

Wait, on purpose?

On purpose. They built a white classical city out of plaster. And the question I want to sit with is... why would anyone spend fifteen million dollars on something they intended to tear down?

Fifteen million in nineteen oh four is what, serious money?

About five hundred and thirty-eight million in today's dollars. Five million from the city through bonds, five from private donors around Missouri, five from a congressional appropriation. President McKinley personally backed it after the organizers visited the White House in February of eighteen ninety-nine.

And what's the occasion? Why St. Louis?

The centennial of the Louisiana Purchase. The treaty was signed in eighteen oh three, so they planned the fair for nineteen oh three... and then pushed it a year, to nineteen oh four, because more countries and more states wanted in and they weren't ready.

So a hundred-and-one-year anniversary. Very American.

Exactly as planned. It opened April thirtieth, nineteen oh four, with Theodore Roosevelt and Secretary of War William Howard Taft at the ceremonies. Sixty-two foreign nations. Forty-three of the then forty-five states. Nearly nineteen point seven million people came through.

Out of a country of what, eighty-something million? That's a staggering share.

On an average day, more than a hundred thousand people were on the grounds, visitors plus the workers who actually lived there. Admission was fifty cents. A daily program cost you a nickel, printed right on site in the Administration Building.

Okay, so what did you actually DO there? Rides? Machines?

Over fifty concession amusements on a strip called the Pike. A Model City exhibit, pitched by a Philadelphia architect named Albert Kelsey, showing sewers, esplanades, underground railways, how to build a better city. Eleven thousand works of art from twenty-six countries, organized by Halsey Cooley Ives.

Eleven thousand. From Winslow Homer to...?

To Japanese ceramics. And Ives did something nobody had done at a world's fair: he put decorative arts and Native American art into the official fine arts display. Furniture, textiles, pottery. Most of those Native pieces made by women. He said any work where the artist worked with conviction and knowledge deserved equal respect.

That's genuinely ahead of its time.

Which makes what happened on the other side of the fairgrounds so much harder to square.

Oh no.

There was a Department of Anthropology, run by a man called W J McGee. Its exhibits weren't objects. They were people. Living people, in reconstructed villages, arranged to show so-called stages of civilization.

Human beings as an exhibit.

Yes. American Indians, Filipinos, others, invited as living displays. The Philippine reservation was the single largest section of the entire fair. The Philippines had become a US colony in eighteen ninety-eight after the Spanish-American War, and the display was built to present Filipino people as uncivilized... to justify extracting profits from the islands.

So the fair is arguing for empire while selling you a hot meal and a souvenir postcard.

And there were Anthropology Days, athletic contests staging Indigenous people against each other, with the results read through the racial theories of the day. The athletic results were more or less discredited. Historians since have said the department wasn't really serving science. It was serving the organizers' agenda.

Did the people in those exhibits have any say at all?

That's the part that complicates the easy story. Scholars who've gone back through the record find living conditions that were often deplorable... and also find American Indians at the fair making their own experience of it. Selling crafts to tourists. Earning money. Finding adventure in it. They were not only what the organizers meant them to be.

So December first, nineteen oh four. It closes. And then... they just knock it all down?

All of it, basically. It was built from something called staff, plaster and fiber. Planned obsolescence. Two buildings were meant to survive: the Flight Cage, now at the St. Louis Zoo, and the Palace of Fine Arts, which Ives fought for... and which is the Saint Louis Art Museum to this day.

So the answer to your question is... they weren't building buildings.

They were building an argument. That cities could be planned, ordered, beautiful. And it landed. St. Louis founded a Civic Improvement League, wrote a city plan, and by nineteen eighteen adopted zoning, second only to New York among big American cities. By nineteen ten it was the fourth largest city in the country.

And Forest Park's still there.

Still there. Nineteen point seven million people walked through a city made of plaster that told them exactly who was civilized and who wasn't. The plaster washed away.

And the idea didn't.

Not for a long time. Which is why it's worth remembering a fair that was never supposed to last.