Editorial Content for Centennial: The Great Fair of 1876 and the Invention of America's Future

“The future is here,” William Gibson wrote, “it’s just not evenly distributed.” There is one easy way to test this. Go to the Oculus in Lower Manhattan --- a gleaming 21st-century transit station that is as up-to-date as next Tuesday --- and from there take a PATH train to Newark Penn Station, which was built in 1935 and is still wearing its Art Deco heritage like a tattered cloak. It’s not exactly time travel, but you get the idea.

The pavilions of the 1876 exhibition for the American Centennial in Fairmount Park in Philadelphia were famously distracting and bewildering for many Americans and visitors for just this reason. The “International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures, and Products of the Soil and Mine,” to give its full name, was a riotous display of what the 20th century had in store for the people of the 19th. The central symbol of the fair was the hand and torch for the Statue of Liberty --- which was waiting for the pedestal to be constructed on Liberty Island, New York, which wouldn’t start for another seven years.

"When Bordewich turns his attention to the happenings at the fair and the personalities who attended it, he does a fine job of telling the story in an engaging way."

But that was hardly the only view of the 20th century that fairgoers would get --- from a massive “walking plank” engine that powered countless gadgets at the fair, to a demonstration of Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone and Thomas Edison’s updated telegraph, to workaday consumer goods like Heinz Tomato Ketchup.

The topic of the Centennial is, of course, timely due to the upcoming 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia --- a celebration that, despite the marvels of 21st-century technology, seems utterly shambolic by comparison. In CENTENNIAL, Fergus M. Bordewich takes the focus off the narrative of the fair and instead places it in a broader historical context. This approach is honest and admirable, though not quite as entertaining.

Unfortunately, 1876 was a Presidential election year, and while the candidates (the formidable Rutherford B. Hayes and the upright and estimable Samuel Tilden, both of whom visited the fair) were not inspiring, there was more than the usual amount of electoral hijinks, which Bordewich details. The fair was interrupted in July by news of a massacre of African Americans in South Carolina by white paramilitary groups, as well as the disastrous Custer campaign in Montana, both of which get chapters in Bordewich’s retelling.

One expects that the preferred story from the perspective of the fair’s organizers would have been that of the scientific and technical advances showcased there, and the successful knitting together of North and South following the Civil War. But you don’t always get to have your own story told the way that you want it. Bordewich focuses not on how the 20th century was being born in a park in West Philadelphia, but on how the flaws, foibles and moral shortcomings of the 19th century appear in the 21st.

When Bordewich turns his attention to the happenings at the fair and the personalities who attended it, he does a fine job of telling the story in an engaging way. And admittedly, it would be difficult to talk about a resurgent America in 1876 without discussing events like Custer’s Last Stand. But if I was a time traveler, leaving Newark on the Pennsylvania Railroad, I’d want to spend as much time at the fair as I could. I wish CENTENNIAL had provided a little more of those stories.