Teaching patriotism: Love and critical freedom

In 1892, a World's Fair, called the "Columbian Exposition," was scheduled to take place in Chicago. Clearly it was gearing up to be a celebration of unfettered greed and egoism. Industry and innovation were to be its central foci, as America planned to welcome the world with displays of technological prowess and material enrichment. Gross inequalities of opportunity in the nation and in the city were to be masked by the glowing exterior of the pure white Beaux-Arts style buildings, right next door to the University of Chicago, that came to be called "the White City." The architectural choices of the exhibition's designers, Daniel Burnham and Daniel Chester French, expressed the idea that America rivals Europe in grandeur and nobility. Everything funny, chaotic, and noisy was relegated to the Midway, outside the precincts of the exhibition: the first Ferris Wheel, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, children, racial and ethnic differences, bright colors, poor people. Instead of real human bodies, disturbing in their heterogeneity and their frailty, the exhibit put forward the gilded "Statue of the Republic," a sixty-five-foot-tall gilded statue of a woman holding a scepter and orb, a smaller replica of which, only twenty-four feet high, created in 1918 to commemorate the Exposition, now stands at Hayes Drive and Cornell. The Chicago Tribune wrote, "It impresses by its grand presence, its serene and noble face, and its perfect harmony with its magnificent surroundings, by its wonderful fitness."