ABSTRACT
While the slow-moving wheels of the Corliss steam engine were the centerpiece of the American Centennial Exhibition that was held in Philadelphia in 1876, the agrarian fair that surrounded the giant engine showed that even after the Civil War, the United States was still a farming society. If, as Leo Marx has suggested, the Corliss engine represented “the machine in the garden,” we find only seventeen years later a reversal of this symbolism in the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. How the nation changed in less than a generation! In the rotunda of the US Government Building, in the heart of an exposition dedicated to civilization and progress, we find a giant redwood tree. Now the “garden” was in the “machine” (see Figure 1.1).1
