ABSTRACT

In r893, the World's Columbian Exhibition opened in Chicago, with a congressional mandate to be "an exhibition of the progress of civilization in the New World." The focal point of that exhibition was the White City, a complex of beaux arts buildings representing seven aspects of civilization's highest achievements (Manufactures, Mines, Agriculture, Art, Administrations, Machinery, and Electricity) around a central basin named the Court of Honor. The White City was an icon of the superiority of civilized white men and pointed towards the ideal, perfectable future of the race. The White City glorified the masculine worlds by filling the buildings with thousands of enormous engines, warships, trains, machines, and armaments, as well as examples of commerce. I

Despite extensive battling by the women's committee to be included in the centerpiece, women's productive labors had been consciously excluded and marginalized to the Woman's Building, which was located between the White City and the Midway Plaisance. The Midway specialized in spectacles of barbarous races, for example, "authentic" villages of Samoans, Egyptians, Turks, Dahomans, and other exotics, with imported "natives." Midway visitors experienced the descent from civilization as they moved from the White City to advanced German and Irish villages, to more barbarous Turkish and Chinese settlements, and finally to savage American Indians. "What an opportunity was here afforded to the scientific mind to descend the spiral of evolution;' enthused the Chicago Tribune, "tracing humanity in its highest phases almost to its animalistic origins:'2

The world exhibition can be read as a representation of the established hierarchy of peoples within a long-playing scientific drama. The hierarchy

expressed in the architecture and spatial layout of the Columbian Exhibition was widely known as the Great Chain of Being, a rank ordering of species from the least primitive to the most civilized, based on evolutionary theory. The Great Chain of Being located white European men and their societies, norms, and values at the pinnacle of civilization and morality. The Columbian Exhibition materialized the evolutionary, social, hierarchical understandings dominant at the time, as it also tied technical progress to a mythic worldly conquest. White men claimed civilization for themselves; white men stood at the evolutionary pinnacle, with all others on lower rungs. Though still dominant, this societal and individual hierarchy was under siege-both white women and Mrican-Americans had protested the exclusiveness of the White City and its crowning of white men alone as "civilized?' And beyond the borders of the Columbian Exhibition, challenges to the dominance of white men were occurring rapidly and regularly.3