Episode 38: A Taste of the St. Louis World’s Fair

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This is the My Dark Path podcast.

Summer has come, and with sunny days bursting all around our country, an American tradition is happening in towns of all sizes - the fair. An American fair has a way of making us all feel like kids again - indulging in fried foods, shouting for joy on thrill rides, handing money over to carnival games, hoping to get that elusive giant stuffed animal. Maybe you’ll get up close with livestock from local farmers, maybe you’ll get a sunburn - but you’ll probably end the day full and exhausted, with a lighter wallet but some great memories.

For everything that’s similar about them, they each are stamped with their own identity. They feel both universally American and charmingly local, with their own peculiar traditions and exhibits. But what happens when one of these celebrations is about something bigger? Not a County Fair, or a State Fair, but a Fair that celebrates all human progress in the modern age; that brings the fruits of these inventions and discoveries to one community? A World’s Fair? These are events that don’t just make memories, they make history.

If you enjoyed our episodes last year about the history of the Olympic Games, you’ll notice quite a few parallels with World’s Fairs. There’s even an official sanctioning body for them - the Bureau International des Expositions, based in Paris. Just as we explored the historical record regarding what events are considered to be official Olympic events, there’s some room for debate regarding what counts as the first World’s Fair - a grand public celebration featuring the latest modern, international developments in industry, technology, and culture. In 1791, when Leopold the Second was coronated as King of Bohemia, there was a long, grand celebration in Prague featuring exhibits of the latest manufacturing technology. And there were multiple International Exhibitions in places like Paris, Sardinia, and Italy throughout the 19th century. But the Bureau’s history of quote-unquote “Official” World’s Fairs begins in 1851, in London.

London in the mid-19th century had plenty of reason to consider itself the capital of the world, with the colonial reach of the British Empire touching practically every time zone on Earth. And it was Queen Victoria herself who commissioned the Great Exhibition of 1851, the first officially recognized World’s Fair. Its ambition was to showcase the latest technology, history, and culture in spectacular style. The centerpiece of the fair was the awe-inspiring glass and metal building called the Crystal Palace. The building itself, which needed no interior light in the daytime, was unlike anything most visitors would have seen at the time, only possible because of recent advances in glass-making. It remained after the Fair, becoming an iconic part of London’s landscape for over 80 years until, tragically, it was destroyed by a fire in 1936. While its exterior was metal and glass, its floor was old timber, and once it ignited, the entire magnificent building was doomed. It’s said that over 100,000 people came to watch the fire, among them Winston Churchill himself. To this day, there are occasional proposals to rebuild the Palace on its former site. It’s just one demonstration of one of those parallels with the Olympics, that a successful World’s Fair has a way of leaving a lasting imprint on the architectural landscape of a host city.

In a time before mass media or safe and affordable international travel, a World’s Fair could be the best opportunity in your life to get a glimpse and a taste of cultures from around the world, to see modern technological wonders with your own eyes.

America hosted its first World’s Fair in 1876, the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Fittingly, the city where the Declaration was signed, Philadelphia, played host for what was called the Centennial International Exhibition. The next American edition happened in 1893 in Chicago, and was named the World’s Columbian Exhibition of 1893, commemorating 400 years since Christopher Columbus reached the Americas. In our episode about the Parsley Massacre on Hispañola, we touched on how Columbus’s place in history has many pros and con; and as we share some of the less enlightened aspects of these Fairs, there are unavoidable parallels to the exploitation and violence which are a part of his fuller legacy. 

We could easily spend multiple episodes on the profound impact that Chicago’s World’s Fair had on American culture - it was the first chance for many visitors to experience electric lights, inventions of Thomas Edison like the Kinetoscope, and cutting-edge musical compositions. There are reports, strongly believed but not 100% confirmed, that Scott Joplin, soon to become the King of Ragtime and one of the most influential composers in American history, might have been there, playing cornet in a sideshow just outside the fairgrounds.

But we want to visit another stop along the dark path that travels through the World’s Fairs - a path that often teaches us as much about our own attitudes and presumptions as it does about the exhibits. In honor of the American summer, we’re paying a visit to the place where many Americans got their first taste of what has become quintessential American food - the hamburger, the hot dog, and the ice cream cone. While each of these treats has its own history, their popularity with the masses, the story of their American-ness, you might say, is often traced to one place - the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition of 1903. Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Thomas Jefferson’s land deal that nearly doubled the size of the United States, this World’s Fair took place in the city of St. Louis, Missouri. So that’s where we’re headed today. No need to pack a snack, you’re going to want to save your appetite.

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Hi, I’m MF Thomas and this is the My Dark Path podcast. In every episode, we explore the fringes of history, science and the paranormal. So, if you geek out over these subjects, you’re among friends here at My Dark Path. I’m happy to announce that we just posted our first Explorers Society episode on Patreon.  We’re so grateful for the support of thousands of listeners across the globe. Subscribers get one exclusive episode a month that’s not available on the public feed.  Our first one is about Bunker 42, the Stalin-era atomic protection shelter dug under Moscow.  I visited it last fall when I was in Moscow.  Visit www.mydarkpath.com to learn more about the Explorers’ Society and to sign up. Also, please listen to the end of the episode to hear promos of two of our favorite podcasts – Pursuit of the Paranormal & the Tipsy Ghost.

Finally, thank you for listening and choosing to walk the Dark Paths of the world with me. Let’s get started with Episode 38: A Taste of the St. Louis World’s Fair.

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PART ONE

There’s a classic musical from 1944 starring Judy Garland called Meet Me in St. Louis. This movie introduced the classic Christmas song “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”, and it climaxes with a visit to a Hollywood re-creation of the St. Louis World’s Fair. During the film, Judy Garland’s family argues about whether or not St. Louis should be considered the greatest city in the United States.

With all due respect to the city known as the Gateway to the West, this argument comes off as a little quaint now; but at the time of the World’s Fair, the powers that be in St. Louis saw themselves as in contention for that title. It was one of the fastest-growing cities in the Midwest, engaged in a fierce rivalry with Chicago to attract people, business, and opportunity. In an intense blitz of lobbying, along with what some might consider behind-the-scenes blackmail, St. Louis won the rights not only to hold a World’s Fair, but to host the 1904 Olympics. As we previously covered on the podcast, the decision to spread Olympic events across many months of the Fair nearly killed off the modern Olympic movement. But the Fair could rightly claim to be one of the biggest, most extraordinary events many of the people involved would ever experience.

David R. Francis was in charge of the planning, and he brought an astounding resume with him - former mayor of St. Louis, former Governor of Missouri, and former United States Secretary of the Interior. His goals were to promote St. Louis as a city with a bright future, show off American superiority in the early 20th century, and make a profit for his investors. The vision for the Fair was gargantuan - Chicago’s exhibits and pavilions had spread out over 600 acres; the St. Louis Fair aimed to double that. The budget was $20 million, that would be somewhere over $600 million today. And when it came time to build across land in the St. Louis suburbs, Francis’s political connections were able to bulldoze any objections. 

In a funny irony, bureaucracy and construction delays prevented the Fair from opening in 1803. The Centennial Celebration had missed the Centennial. But when it did open, it had every reason to advertise itself to visitors as a once-in-a-lifetime happening; something you would tell your grandchildren about. Doctors even advised that people with weak hearts or sensitive dispositions should stay away, for fear that the overwhelming sensation of it all might kill people.

By the time the fair closed, it had welcomed around 19 million visitors, at a ticket price of just fifty cents, less than $20 today. If it entertained anyone to death, we don’t have much record of that; but we can tell you plenty about what visitors would have experienced there.

The main part of the Fair consisted of 12 great Exhibition palaces; designed to evoke the wonder of Ancient Greece in gleaming white. The Palace of Agriculture was the largest at 800,000 square feet, almost the size of Buckingham Palace. Other palaces included Transportation, Education, and Fine Arts; and other than Fine Arts, all of them were built to be temporary - made from wood and plaster mixed with straw. The Palace of Fine Arts, though, was intended to be a permanent gift to the people of St. Louis, built with limestone, brick, and steel. The Fair saw these Palaces, taken all together, as a kind of University of the Future, educating visitors about the progress humankind was making in all arenas. 

The palace of Transportation was especially impressive, showcasing a cutting-edge German locomotive and over 100 kinds of automobiles. Motorcars were running around the fair, the first many people would have ever seen; and if they looked up, they might see hot air balloons and airships, floating through the skies. Listen to our very first episode to hear more about just how much we love airships at My Dark Path.

The center of the Fair was a Festival Hall, which sat in front of a man-made lake, known as the Grand Basin. The water from the Grand Basin filled the Cascades, a captivating series of water fountains. The central palaces were all illuminated by electric light bulbs, which had existed for over 25 years at this point but still weren’t in common use. To many of the people attending, they would never have seen that many in one place at once. And, to top it off, an innovative electrician developed a way to light the fountains from below, making the waters sparkle and glow, even at night. Imagine seeing a marvel like that for the first time.

The Grand Basin was also the site for thrilling pageants, reenacting famous naval battles. And inside the Festival Hall, fair-goers could listen to symphonic music from the world’s most renowned composers. The organ in the Hall, with five keyboards, was the largest in the world at the time. It’s now in a church in St. Louis, where it still works. 

Another major feature was the Colonnade of the States, where each state and territory in the United States had their own building; 42 in all. California’s featured a bear made out of prunes, while the Midwestern states proudly displayed their corn alongside butter sculptures.

Foreign countries also had exhibit halls, including Germany, Sweden, France, Great Britain, China, Cuba, and Brazil. China and Japan gave presentations in the Education palace, demonstrating their school systems to any visitors. The educational system of Japan was widely-praised; and is one of the reasons why, in this showcase, it was the only non-European nation seen as an equal on the world stage.

Photography had been invented some 60 years before, but Kodak had only introduced the first portable camera in the last decade. The World’s Fair gave a number of visitors their first chance to take their own photographs. But there were official photographers, too. I’d especially like to spotlight Jessie Tarbox Beals, who blazed trails for women in the photography profession. She started her working life as a teacher, but won a camera in a contest selling magazine subscriptions, and quickly demonstrated remarkable talent. She was hired by the Buffalo Inquirer in 1902, the first woman to work as a professional photojournalist.

Her newspaper assigned her to cover the Fair - but she arrived late and had to argue with the Exhibit office in order to secure a press pass. She made it in, and found an extraordinary spectacle. Beals was known for preferring to get candid, spontaneous shots - not easy when you’re lugging around over 50 pounds’ worth of camera gear and glass photographic plates. But she’d go a long way for the right picture, climbing a 20-foot ladder for a high vantage point on a parade, or jumping into a hot air balloon. While at the Fair, she snapped a candid photograph of none other than President Theodore Roosevelt. And Teddy was so impressed by the shot that he hired her onto his official staff.

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Most of the people who attended the Fair were locals, naturally, but you can see why the attractions we’re describing here might attract people from far and wide. And they did - many arriving by horse and buggy - you needed a parking permit for your horse. If you wanted to bring your horseless carriage, you had to register in advance; and 500 motorists did, but only 75 of them actually reached the Fair. Remember that there were almost no paved roads anywhere, and the automobiles of the time were exceedingly primitive and fragile. They had no safety features, and because of the design of the engines, the only way to drive up a hill was backwards.

If people from faraway wanted to attend the Fair, their best bet would be the train, which had been stitching the country together for much of the last few decades. A train fare of $5 translates to about $160 today, similar to what you might play for a short flight. It was worth it for many people if it meant experiencing the great World’s Fair.

And although, as we mentioned, the fair saw attendance of some 19 million people, a few would be-visitors, tragically, never made it. One of the trains bound for the Fair collided with a freight train near Warrensburg, MO, causing the boiler to explode. Scalding water and shrapnel blasted everyone in the vicinity; in the end, 28 people died, while many others were seriously injured, and those who did survive were understandably too traumatized to continue the journey to St. Louis.

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PART TWO

We talked about getting some food at the Fair, which means that we have to leave the astounding Exposition Palaces behind and head for the midway. At any great fair, the midway is where you’ll find the food and entertainment; and at the St. Louis World’s Fair, the midway was known as the Pike. Taking up the southern boundary of the fair, it was a full mile long, and cost one million dollars to build. 

This is where you could take a spin on the giant Ferris wheel, or take whimsical carnival rides under the sea or through Hell itself, here you’d be taunted by devils wearing satin costumes. Other rides would give you the feeling of voyaging from New York to the North Pole, where you would be blasted by jets of cold air. And if you wanted a break from these imaginary entertainments, the Pike offered plenty of real ones as well, like an interactive zoo where you could see, touch, even ride exotic animals like zebras, ostriches, camels, elephants, and giant tortoises. 

The Pike’s bandstands hosted musicians from all over North America as well as Europe, Asia, and Russia. There was one new style of music sweeping the country which the Fair Committee didn’t approve - Ragtime. They considered it low-class, possibly even subversive; but as with the Chicago World’s Fair, there are indications that Scott Joplin, the leading developer of ragtime music, found opportunities to perform for fairgoers. He did live in St. Louis at the time, and we do know he attended the Fair, because he composed a rag in honor of those extraordinary fountains. He called it “Cascades”, and when I listen to it, I imagine the smiles on the faces of families, marveling at all the sparkling water:

https://archive.org/details/78_the-cascades_ralph-sutton-scott-joplin_gbia0101687a/The+Cascades+-+Ralph+Sutton+-+Scott+Joplin.flac

At the Pike you could gaze on sights from around the world, like replicas of the Tyrol region of Austria, or the ancient city of Constantinople. There were pavilions representing Paris, Italy, Egypt, and India, along with a grand Japanese Garden, and a Chinese village. Exhibits like this were part of Walt Disney’s inspiration for the World Showcase at Walt Disney World’s EPCOT Center - a way to sample cultures from everywhere in just one day.

There were also living exhibits, with people from other cultures imitating their daily lives - and this is where we start to glimpse the darker side of the World’s Fair; where our attempts to demonstrate our superiority, in retrospect, showed our ignorance. 

The Pike had an exhibit called “Cliff Dwellers of the Southwest” - a fake village for Native Americans, mostly from Texas. There was a an “Eskimo Village” where fair-goers could meet people they were told were Alaskan natives, and ride dog sleds while surrounded by plaster glaciers. We know now that these weren’t actually Inuit, but Native Americans from somewhere other than Alaska, playing a role in a fake depiction of native Alaskan life. We’ve talked a lot on this podcast about how stories can lead us astray, and misperceptions about civilizations other than our own have stubbornly persisted, sometimes reinforced so much until they get mistaken for truth. It’s why one of our goals is to see if we can course correct the narrative just a little bit.

These “exhibits” of living people were presented under the banner of “Anthropology” - but the truth is that it wasn’t far from a human zoo. Anthropology was not a well-defined scientific field at the time, and sometimes was used more as a psuedoscientific justification for imperialism and eradication of native cultures; the dangerous idea that we, as the superior people of the world, were bringing enlightenment to the uncivilized.

Guests at the World’s Fair had no reason to question what was being presented to them as science - even the false idea that these so-called “primitives” were less evolved then we were, and therefore doomed to die out without our help. Darker still, there was the sense that, as St. Louis wanted the World’s Fair to show off American greatness at the start of the 20th century, that part of the greatness they might have wanted to boast of included colonial conquests like the recently-annexed Philippines.    

This Fair holds a disquieting distinction of being the largest-ever exhibition of native people from diverse global cultures for the purposes of entertainment and a pretense of education. It’s hard to stomach a practice like this, but the idea that both our biology and culture must be the better one was the mainstream scientific opinion at the time. That their differences weren’t an opportunity to learn, but simply backwards amusements.

The leader of the Anthropology presentation was W.J. McGee, a geologist, anthropologist, and theoretical evolutionist. Remember that Charles Darwin’s landmark study On the Origin of the Species was only published in 1859, just 45 years before the Fair. It was still hotly debated whether different ethnicities of human were, fundamentally, the same underneath, with a common ancestry. And there were some, like McGee, who interpreted Darwin’s theories in ways that were never intended.

He believed that the white race was the pinnacle of both biological and cultural development. He proposed that you could classify different groups of people under four headings of increasing virtue - savagery, barbarism, civilization, and enlightenment. I don’t have to tell you where he considered himself, or where he considered the people living within his exhibit. He invited social scientists to come to St. Louis, and join him in studying the, quote, “racial features”, of the natives on display.

There were as many as 3,000 of them, organized by group into fake “villages” of about 40 acres each. They came from the Philippines, North and South America, Central Africa, and Japan. The Ainu were the native people from Japan; and we have accounts of crowds being intrigued by their patience, cleanliness, fair skin, and exceptional archery skills.

Even here, McGee’s entirely subjective system of classification had an effect. The villages were organized by his rankings of their levels of civilization; with the lowest being the Mbuti, or Pygmies, from Central Africa. The self-styled “Anthropologists” described the Mbuti to Fair-goers as cannibals who lived in trees. Why would the guests doubt this? It was presented to them as the latest scientific research at the World’s Fair. Organizers would ask the Mbuti to pose with machetes, to pantomime beheading people, all in the name of entertainment. One of them, Ota Benga, had filed teeth, a detail that caused such a sensation that he was moved from the Fair…and put on display in the Bronx Zoo.

McGee and his co-workers decided that the natives would bring materials from their homelands, to recreate how they lived and worked as unencumbered by "modern" technology and materials as possible. Cave dwellings from the Southwest, the entire village for the peoples from the Philippines; all were built in this quasi-authentic way, but made little sense in the completely different climate of St. Louis.

More than 51 tribal nations from North America were represented, including the Pima, the Apache, the Navajo, the Lakota Sioux, and the Arapaho. At the very top of W.J. McGee’s ranking of these civilizations, literally sitting on top of a hill overlooking the others, was the so-called “Indian School”. This is where students, separated from their way of life, would be encouraged to show off their English language skills, and so-called “civilized” activities like sewing and baseball. 

It was longstanding policy in both the US and Canada to force First Nations children into boarding schools, in an effort to assimilate them into our society. This had the effect of eradicating their language and culture; the children would be forbidden to even see their families. There are wide reports of physical and even sexual abuse; and the last of these schools was still open into the 1970’s.

We mentioned the people of the Philippines - now, they had their own area in the so-called “Anthropology” exhibit, on the other side of the artificial Lake Arrowhead. Their home had been annexed by America after the Spanish-American War of 1898. Visitors would enter through a replica of the city of Manila but, like the other artificial villages, this was organized by what the Fair considered to be their level of civilization. Because the Philippines contained multiple nations of indigienous people; at least five were represented at the Fair - the Bagobos, the Igorots, the Negritos, the Visayans, and the Moros. The latter two were Muslims that lived in villages in towns, while the first three were generally more nomadic hunter-gatherers, and so classified as primitives. Imagine taking a corn farmer from Iowa, putting them in a zoo next to a Bay Area tech worker, and declaring the farmer to be a member of a separate, inferior species. And having the audacity to call it science. There’s a photograph taken at the Fair of one of the Bagobos - the caption reads only: “The Missing Link.”

The Igorot village seems to have been the most popular with the fair-goers. They wore almost no clothing, which scandalized and titillated visitors, who sometimes would give the villagers clothes to cover themselves. They also had a cultural tradition of tattooing, fully on display because of their lack of clothes; and, most shocking and damning of all, they had been known to eat dogs when necessary to survive. It’s easy to pass judgment on a culture when you have no conception of what they have to do in order to live.

I can’t imagine what it was like, being transplanted from your home to this faraway place to be gawked at. Health and safety weren’t a priority in getting them there. They were put on a train in Tacoma, Washington, and when the weather turned cold, the Fair organizers decided to save money by leaving the heat off, and refusing to provide warm clothing. Hypothermia killed multiple Igorots on the trip. Without asking permission, the “Anthropologists” removed the brains of the dead in order to study them; presumably looking for some biological marker that would identify them as a lesser species. When they offered to return the brains, the Igorots refused - they viewed this as a gruesome atrocity, a violation of the dignity of their dead, tantamount to an act of war.

Meanwhile, those 51 Native American nations I mentioned weren’t just on display, they were part of the entertainment. Every day on the Pike, you could watch a Wild West spectacular presented by showman Frederick T. Cummins. These shows were widely popular entertainment from 1883 to about 1916; the most famous being the one presented by Buffalo Bill Cody. These shows helped create a lot of myths about life on the Frontier that carried on into pulp novels and Western movies.

The Native Americans at the Pike would perform archery and stunts on horseback, present supposedly "traditional" dances, hold contests in lacrosse and tipi-raising, and participate in historical reenactments. Cummins had military cavalry members who would re-enact battles; in order to please President Roosevelt, he had them portray the storming of San Juan Hill, a charge which Teddy had led personally. 

And for the hefty price of $5, you could get an autograph from the great Apache War Chief Geronimo; who had a rare and upsetting status - simultaneously a prisoner of war and a tourist attraction. He would remain under government surveillance for the rest of his life.

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PART THREE

We hope you don’t feel duped that, having promised you hot dogs and ice cream, we’ve been detailing these more exploitative features of the St. Louis World’s Fair. I only want to stress that sometimes, our enjoyment, our comfort, is coming at someone else’s cost, and it’s worth looking a little closer. We can be a little too good at keeping the darker things hidden behind the curtain.

So much about the Fair was every bit as impressive and as ground-breaking as its organizers hoped it would be. The advances in technology and culture were genuinely revolutionary, and dazzling to experience. There was a remarkable display of a new invention - incubators to care for premature babies. The inventor was at least a bit of a flim-flam artist, not even a doctor as he claimed; but his invention, incredibly, worked, and saved lives.

And this overall story about progress even applies to the food - so much of which would simply not be possible for mass consumption in previous generations. Yes, you’ve been patient enough. It’s time to eat.

There were over 130 different places to eat just on the Pike, which could accommodate thousands of diners; and there were even more innovations to sample at the Agriculture Palace. The Kellogg company boasted that their cereals would promote healthy digestion. Borden gave you the chance to try condensed milk. The China pavilion introduced you to flavors from half a world away. 

One quintessentially American treat you couldn’t get, though, was Coca-Cola. You see, this is when the popular beverage still used Coca leaves as an ingredient; and organizers weren’t sure it was safe for everyone to consume.

The popular legend is that the St. Louis World’s Fair is where the hamburger, the hot dog, and the ice cream cone were actually invented. Here’s one version of the legend - that on a hot day, an ice cream vendor was facing a rush of customers, and running out of serving dishes. Working at the next stand was a confectioner from Syria, Ernest Hamwi, an expert at making a sweet, thin, waffle. Sensing opportunity, Hamwi rolled one of his waffles into a cone shape, and now business was booming for the both of them.

It’s a great story, and perhaps some version of it happened, but there’s irrefutable evidence that this is not where the ice cream cone was invented. A confectioner named Tallo Marchioni filed a patent for an ice cream cone in 1903, one year before; and one fairgoer, writing about their visit, remarked that they had seen a similar treat on a visit to Germany. Thin waffles are a ubiquitous treat across the Netherlands, and can serve as the basis for either a sweet or savory meal, like a crepe or a croissant. So this wasn’t the invention of the ice cream cone; but, as with so many modern developments, this was probably the first time it was given such mass exposure, in an environment ideal to make it popular. 

Another one of these myths go that a vendor in the India Pavilion was having a hard time selling cups of the tea from his home country; because of the sweltering St. Louis heat. Add a few ice cubes, though, and a beloved drink is born - iced tea. Again, a closer look exposes this as something of a fairy tale, there are recipes for iced tea in American cookbooks dating back to 1868. But there was a technological revolution in tea happening at the time of the Fair - the tea bag. Patented in 1903, it made it possible for anyone who wanted a cup to easily make some. And as for the ice - refrigeration was another technology on the verge of changing how we live.

Maybe we’ll have better luck with the hotdog - technically a sausage in a long bun, ready for mustard, relish, onions, or whatever else you care to pile on. Sausages were certainly nothing new - America had seen heavy waves of immigration from Germany, and they brought with them foods like sauerkraut, schnitzel, and bratwurst. The frankfurter became the most common main ingredient, and the bun which held it was invented in the 1870’s, already widely-available at the time of the Fair. They would have been known as frankfurter sandwiches. It was only a popular cartoon of a dachshund in a long bun that would lead to the American name - the hot dog.

One thing that the hot dog and the ice cream cone had in common was that they were hand food - you could eat them while standing and walking. Immigrant laborers, working long hours, often needed foods that could be eaten quickly on breaks without table settings and silverware. For people enjoying a leisurely visit to the Fair, this convenience allowed them to eat while they kept exploring. 

This was also true with the hamburger, maybe the source of the biggest myth about food at the St. Louis Fair. Here’s the version told for entertainment - that a lunch counter owner from Athens, Texas named Fletcher Davis invented the hamburger all by himself and bought it to the Fair, where it became an overnight sensation in American food. Fletcher may not have been aware that, as far back as 1884 in an article in the Boston Journal, a dish of chopped beef originating in Hamburg, Germany, was already described as “hamburger.” Americans already widely enjoyed chopped beef as a dish - they called it Salisbury steak. The World’s Fair in Philadelphia in 1876 is where they unveiled the at-home meat grinder, so Americans had already been grinding their own beef at home for a generation.

As with the hot dog being originally called a frankfurter sandwich, the hamburger was originally called a hamburger sandwich - serving the hamburger meat on a bun. Hamburger sandwiches were already popular at lunch wagons in the 1890’s - again answering that need of urban laborers to get some quick, satisfying nutrition into their system.

But if the hamburger hadn’t become essential American cuisine yet, the reason was probably completely separate from the spotlight of the World’s Fair, and has much more to do with how much you could trust the meat that you bought.

The Fair was taking place in 1904. It was 1905 that Upton Sinclair published the first seralized version of The Jungle, one of the books that has had the greatest impact on how we live today. The Jungle explosed the deplorable conditions in the meat-packing plants of Chicago. Deplorable, but not illegal, since the government had not set standards or regulations for food safety. It was the outcry that followed Sinclair’s book which led, just one year letter, to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.

The plants in Chicago were in an area known as Packingtown, mostly staffed by immigrants from Eastern Europe. Sinclair exposed that, while there were government inspectors, there were only three covering the entire city, and they were in the direct employ of local political bosses. They were paid to approve everything. He described a physician discovering the bodies of steers with tuberculosis being sold for processing. Old and diseased cattle were a primary source for canned meat products.

Living cattle would be fed leftovers from beer breweries, stuffed so full that they would develop giant ulcers that would burst when workers cut into them. The employees, under intense pressure from their bosses, would carry on their tasks, covered in the blood and pus of the dead cows.

Pigs that died from cholera on their way to the plant were processed anyway. Workers would show up for their shifts even if they had tuberculosis themselves, or infected cuts from cutting and canning equipment. 

Grease and chemicals seeped into the Chicago River, giving it the nickname “Bubbly Creek” because of the non-stop bubbling of carbonic acid. Sometimes, the toxic sludge in the water even caught fire.

Before 1906, if you bought ground beef, you had no way of knowing whether or not its weight had been artificially increased by flour or oatmeal; or whether the fresh, red color was real, or the result of chemical treatment by borax or sulfuric acid. Sometimes, the so-called beef actually included dog meat. Remember how that Anthropology exhibit saw the Igorot as savages for eating dog meat. Plenty of Americans were unwittingly doing the same.

The St. Louis Fair featured a pure food exhibit in the Agriculture Palace. They compared different brands of ketchup to expose the number of potentially-harmful chemicals which were appearing in popular food products. But it was The Jungle that turned these concerns into a revolution. 

Upton Sinclair’s work ignited outrage across the nation; not just concerning food safety but in safety and rights for the workers who were so sickened and endangered by these factory conditions. So it may well be that, while you could enjoy a hamburger at the World’s Fair, it was a few more years before it was a food you could enjoy safely all the time.

As America was moving into the modern age, we needed to trust our food better. A great population shift was underway, Advances in farming technology were creating more efficient machines, stronger yielding crops. That meant there were fewer jobs for farmhands, so generations were moving from rural areas to seek good-paying jobs in cities. You didn’t have the time to source and prepare all your meals yourself; you had to rely on the consumer marketplace to provide. If you can’t trust what you eat, modern civilization grinds to a halt quickly. Many of the miracles on display at the Fair are the ones that make it possible now for a person in Maine to enjoy an orange from California any day of the year. 

Florida unveiled their new variety of Pomelo grapefruit. You could sample exotic fruits from Central and South America. One particular fruit - delicious and packed with essential nutrients - came to us from Cuba and Brazil - the banana. But there are far too many dark paths involving America’s relationship with the banana; we’ll leave that be for now. After everything we just sampled, you’re probably feeling pretty full.

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PART FOUR

World’s Fairs are still happening - the next one will be hosted in Argentina in 2023. The last Fair to happen in America was in 1984 in the City of New Orleans, which we recently visited on this very podcast. Minnesota had competed to host next year’s Fair, proposing the theme “Healthy People, Healthy Planet.” No doubt our food supply, and the ways we can use science to make it safer and healthier, would have played a major role.

But it’s fair to say that World’s Fairs haven’t been a major part of America’s cultural conversation for decades. Mass media has made it easier than ever to keep up with new discoveries and inventions, and cuisine inspired by foreign cultures has, itself, become a beloved American dining habit, part of our power as a melting pot. And it’s more difficult to justify the extraordinary expense and maintenance cost of what will ultimately be a temporary celebration. 

The World’s Fair in Seattle in 1962 left behind one of the great marvels of its landscape - the Space Needle; built to celebrate the ambitions and breakthroughs of the American space program. The 1964 World’s Fair featured a number of attractions created by Walt Disney, including the dolls representing children from cultures around the globe, united by the song “It’s a Small World.” The dolls later moved to their permanent home at Disnelyand in California.

Our staff writer, Anna Sahlstrom, who did so much work preparing this episode for us, shared with me her childhood memories of attening the World's Fair Expo '86 in Vancouver, British Columbia. She describes it as huge and overwhelming, with an “awesome” play area where water squirted up from pads on the ground. She also remembers each area of the Fair having its own predominant color, and a temporary light-rail system connecting it all. She also distinctly remembers the unpleasant experience of strangers touching her strikingly white-blonde, curly hair. I’m sure that gave her some ingrained sympathy for the idea that people shouldn’t be treated as living amusements.

When David R. Francis, the President of the St. Louis Exposition Committee, summarized the legacy of the Fair for posterity, this is what he wrote: 

“The Exposition of 1904 holds a place in history more conspicuous than its projectors anticipated. For the opening decade of this century it stands as a marker of the accomplishments and progress of man. So thoroughly did it represent the world's civilizations that if all man's other works were by some unspeakable catastrophe blotted out the records established at this Exhibition by the assembled nations would afford the necessary standards for the rebuilding of our entire civilization.”

I would consider that a bit of showman’s hyperbole, maybe even outright hullabaloo; but you can see what he based his opinion on - the St. Louis World’s Fair was, at that moment in history, the only place where all of these marvels could be experienced at the same time. On those terms, it is undeniably both singular and amazing, worth remembering by future generations.

Like the Palace of Fine Arts left behind after the rest of the Fair was taken down, like the defining pleasures of the modern American diet, it’s left a permanent mark on our landscape. But it’s important to remember two things - one, that some of that progress being celebrated came to the Fair along a very dark path. And two, that progress didn’t stop there. We should equally celebrate our own progress since 1904, that a great portion of American society now sees the basic dignity in people from other backgrounds, and treats foreign cultures as opportunities to learn and grow, rather than mock and dismiss. A human zoo is a thing we have thankfully left behind, like, most of the time, tainted meat.

The modern world sparkles with progress, like the water of the Cascades. And now that 118 years have passed, it’s almost certain that every person who walked the Palaces and the Pike of the St. Louis World’s Fair has left this world behind. In some ways, we’ve changed. In others, we haven’t changed enough. The atmosphere of optimism and delight that must have filled the air, it’s giddy stuff; a sugar rush beyond any confectioner’s treat. And we love it because progress deserves celebrating. It gives us hope for a better tomorrow.

But as our own tour has hopefully demonstrated, machines alone won’t be enough to make that tomorrow. Progress always, ultimately, starts with us.

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Thank you for listening to My Dark Path. I’m MF Thomas, creator and host, and I produce the show with Courtney and Eli Butler; and our creative director is Dom Purdie. This story was prepared for us by Anna Sahlstrom. Our Senior Story Editor is Nicholas Thurkettle, and our fact-checker Nicholas Abraham; big thank yous to them and the entire My Dark Path team.

Please take a moment and give My Dark Path a 5-star rating wherever you’re listening. It really helps the show, and we love to hear from you. 

Again, thanks for walking the dark paths of history, science and the paranormal with me. Until next time, good night.