Norton on the Fair

 











 "The great Fair was indeed a superb and appropriate symbol of our great nation, in its noble general design and in the inequalities of its execution; in its unexampled display of industrial energy and practical capacity; in the absence of the higher works of creative imagination; in its incongruities, its mingling of noble realities and ignoble pretenses, in its refinements check-by-jowl with vulgarities, in its order and its confusion--in its heterogeneousness and its unity."

This comment by Harvard President Charles Eliot Norton, an official of the Columbian Exposition, gives evidence that at least some of those involved in its planning and execution were well aware of the ideological issues being played out there.  While scholars and other observers today often suggest that the White City represented an effort by an emerging elite to impose their largely middle class values and the Midway provided an alternative popular culture, perhaps the Fair also could be seen as an effort to find a way for multiple cultures to exist alongside, even over-lapping, one another.