Christine Macy
Introduction
The World Exposition held in Chicago in 1893 holds a special place in the annals of American history. The first exposition held in the American West, its planning and exhibits represented not only a certain coming-of-age for the country, hosting an exposition that aimed to match that of Paris in size and grandeur, but it also represented the moment when Chicago took its place among the other cities of the United States. In the eyes of its supporters, the planning and organization evident throughout the spectacular year-long event was proof that Chicago was no longer a western ‘boom town’, but a city with a cultured and civilized citizenry.
The frontier was over. Or so the census of 1890 had declared, once every section and quarter section of the country had been officially settled with at least two persons per square mile. This fact was driven home by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, in his address to American historians assembled on the occasion of the Chicago fair. Yet, symbols of the frontier could be found everywhere on the exposition grounds: in monumental statues of wild American animals, reconstructions of rustic log cabins, ethnographic dioramas of native people in their ‘traditional’ settings, and relics of the giant redwoods serving as government exhibits as well as fruit juice stands. If the frontier was in fact a thing of the past, the grounds of the Chicago exposition revealed that it was very much present in people’s imagination. In fact, the planning and design of the entire exhibition revealed a bit of ‘frontier’, or ‘wilderness’ in the very centre of the fairgrounds, in a pair of wooded islands the fair’s planner Frederick Law Olmsted kept free of buildings – save a significant few.
This chapter explores three readings of the wooded islands as a symbol of the frontier. The standard reading, put forth by Olmsted, presents the islands as a respite from (and welcome contrast to) the ‘civilized’ White City, which was the architectural scheme for the rest of the fair. A second reading of the islands can be found in the popular detective novels of the era. In this penny literature written for a young readership, ‘marginal’ areas of the fair – like the exposition’s periphery and the wooded islands – provide opportunities for lawlessness, inversions of respectable behaviour and license for men, women, and especially children to act out transgressive behaviour on the symbolic margins of society. A third reading brings us to look more closely at a small cabin built on the wooded islands, the only building Olmsted permitted to be constructed on his ‘wilderness preserve’. This exhibit was designed by the members of the east coast American elite as a lesson in the importance of the frontier experience to the development of a virile and empowered male Anglo-Saxon citizenry. These three readings show how varied and contested were ideas of the frontier in the 1890s, as the country recognized that its period of settlement was drawing to a close and it was entering an era of intensive urbanization.
The idea that a built work – a building for example, or the grounds of the Chicago exposition – can be interpreted in different ways by different people has been an important feature of cultural production and criticism in the late twentieth century. Since Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text, the role of the reader has been increasingly recognized as an essential component in the interpretation of works of art.2 The making of meaning, suggests Barthes, is an act that requires both ‘author’ and ‘reader’. This essay explores this idea in a nineteenth-century setting, a time when the distinction between ‘high’ culture and ‘popular’ culture seemed an important one to maintain. The readings explored here – representing elite views of the frontier expressed in the planning and design of the exposition, and popular readings of these frontier spaces, found in the penny literature of the period – open a window onto the complexity and mutability of the idea of the frontier in turn-of-the – century America.3