Coming up on the 400th anniversary of the voyage of Christopher Columbus, America thought it a great time to celebrate it with a World’s Fair. They further decided to hold it in the west in Chicago to display how far things had come on the “frontier”. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
First we should take a little time with this stamp issue. In my opinion a masterpiece of a stamp issue. Rather than just show the World’s Fair. Instead we get a 15 stamp issue taking us through the history of Columbus’s negotiations with Queen Isabella, the highs of the first landing, the difficulties of the new colonies, the lows of Columbus being returned in chains to Spain and even the redemption he experienced in Barcelona late in life when people realized the magnitude of what Columbus accomplished. All this from 1893 when most stamps were royal portraits.
Todays stamp is issue A72, a 2 cent stamp issued by the USA in 1893. It was a 15 stamp issue with denominations as high as $5,( at least $132 in todays money, the CPI calculator only went back to 1913. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 40 cents used. High values in the set seem to stick with unused, never hinged copies especially the few imperforates and those with no gum. The $5 stamp is up at $9500.
It was an ambition of the USA to host a World’s Fair comparable with earlier ones in London and Paris. An earlier one in Philadelphia was unsuccessful. The Columbus anniversary was the excuse and Congress had to decide between bids from New York City, Chicago, and Saint Louis. Financial packages were heavily considered and it was quite the effort but Chicago outbid New York. It was also argued that Chicago had more space, cleaner air, and better represented a country whose center of gravity wasthen moving west.
Chicago also had a great advantage of new urban architects including Daniel Barnham and Fredrick James Almsted to work on the project. They designed a beau arts style “White City” with a large reflecting pool representing Columbus’s ocean journey. There were 42 pavilions displaying different countries and record producer Sol Bloom designed an amusement park for the kids.
The fair started as a success. One of the displays was a “street in Cairo” that featured America’s first belly dancer doing the suggestive dance called the Hokky Pokki. The dancer was known as Little Egypt and was really from Syria and married to a local Greek restaurateur. The tune she moved to was composed by Sol Bloom and is today known as the Snake Charmers song.
The Fair ended early after the mayor was assassinated and it was thought more appropriate for the fair to close early. Surprisingly given the time, the Mayor wasn’t killed by an anarchist but a crazy man who thought that railroads were killing too many people at crossings and the Mayor should have fixed it. Clarence Darrow took the assassins’ case hoping to have him declared insane. The prosecution pointed out that he had loaded his revolver for safety by not having a bullet in the first chamber showing a right mind. It was one of Clarence Darrow’s few trial losses.
You can probably gather that the fair would not pass the smell test of the modern politically correct. Even in the period, black civil rights leader Fredrick Douglas wrote a pamphlet complaining that black people’s contributions to Columbus were being ignored. In more modern times the tact changed. Now the idea of an idealized white city is thought racist. The country pavilions were recast as freak shows. Special attention was directed at the Woman’s Pavilion which had a display of woman made Indian, Samoan, and African crafts under the banner of “Woman’s work in savagery”.
The powers that be in Chicago have changed a little since 1893. The Mayor is now a mixed Indian/African American lesbian named Lori Lightfoot. Earlier this year she authorized the removal of the Christopher Columbus statues in Chicago.
Well my drink is empty and I will pour another to toast the people who put fairs together that celebrate progress or perhaps spill it on people that would take it all down. Come again on Monday when there will be another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.