For six months, Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park hosted the continent’s first World’s Fair, a triumphal extravaganza that comprised some 200 buildings including spectacular glass palaces that highlighted the inventions, manufactures, and arts of America and the world.
In all, almost 10 million people visited the Centennial, roughly 20% of the nation’s population. Most visitors were awestruck. Alexander Graham Bell, on hand to demonstrate the first telephone, wrote to his fiancée: “It is so prodigious and wonderful that it absolutely staggers one.”
In the South, Black Americans were fighting to preserve their hard-won civil rights against resurgent white supremacists. Strife between labor and management was mounting toward the country’s first national strike. Less than 90 miles north of Philadelphia, coal miners were being hanged on trumped-up charges in an effort to destroy embryonic labor union activity. While the Chinese pavilion charmed visitors to the Centennial, Chinese immigrants in California were enduring racist pogroms. And renewed war with Indigenous groups loomed in the West after the destruction of George Armstrong Custer’s command in June 1876.
The election was among the most bitterly contested in history, with no clear winner and both parties claiming victory. Republican Rutherford B. Hayes lost the popular vote but prevailed in the Electoral College by one vote, after the discounting of the disputed votes of three southern states.
Visitors to the Centennial found no such troubling realities. The nation’s minorities were almost totally unacknowledged. Black Americans were largely excluded from the Centennial’s jobs, with the glaring exception of menial labor, including janitors and messengers, and waiters at a Southern-themed restaurant, which advertised a band of “old time darkies” strumming banjos and Black waiters impersonating slaves.
American workers were almost as invisible, since few could afford the cost of attending the Centennial.
Read more: We’ve Never Agreed About George Washington and Slavery
Telling the truth about America is not “un-American.” Nor is it an insult to the nation’s founders, whose brilliantly crafted machine of government has continued to serve us for 250 years.
A truthful Semiquincentennial should acknowledge the work that remains to be done to propel us into the future, toward greater freedom, tolerance, and more complete democracy.
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