[Unless otherwise noted, the information in this section is taken largely from Julie K. Rose's website, The World's Columbian Exposition: Idea, Experience, Aftermath.]The late nineteenth century was, for America and the world, a time of great expositions showcasing the culture and development of particular nations. Each designated a "World's Fair," these expositions gave America a chance to show the world its greatness and promise as a young industrial nation. Two great expositions bracket the time period in which Mark Twain wrote Connecticut Yankee: the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876 and the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893. An examination of the two expositions reveals how rapidly technology was changing in America at the time and America's growth and increasing mastery of science.
Expositions helped to define a sense of "Americanness," especially important in what Rose calls
an age of increasing fragmentation and confusion, of self-conscious searching for an identity on a personal and on a national level. The industrial, and increasingly electrical, revolutions were transforming America; the American way of life was no longer based on agriculture, but on factories and urban centers, and the end of the Gilded Age signified the advent of what Alan Trachtenberg has called the 'incorporation of America,' the shift of social control from the people and government to big business.The Great Columbian Exposition of 1893, held in Chicago to celebrate the four-hundredth year since Columbus's discovery of America, was an exercise in vastness. It spanned 633 acres, used 75 million board feet of lumber and 18,000 tons of iron and steel, and was illuminated by 120,000 incandescent lights. President Cleveland himself tripped the switch to turn on the generator that lit the fair. One quarter of the population of the United States visited the Columbian Exposition in the time that it ran between May 1 and October 31, 1893.
The goal of the fair was not just to celebrate Columbus's landing, but also to present "a positive redefinition of America, one in which the country stood as a cultural, commercial, and technological leader." The fair stood as a wall against the onslaught of change, as America experienced the growing pains of an agricultural society becoming an industrial one. Furthermore, the exposition itself was representative of that change: it signalled the ultimate merger of commerce and technology, as its buildings showcased great inventions and the Midway marketed smaller devices to fairgoers. To Americans, the fair had three main purposes: first, to introduce Americans to the technology emerging all around them; second, to alleviate fears of technology; and third, to show Americans that the move from an agricultural to a technological society can be considered forward progress. In the late nineteenth century, "progress" itself was defined by technology.
The many late-nineteenth-century expositions were important in securing and validating America's values. According to Schlereth, the fair both catered to middle-class values and shaped them (171). Mark Wahlgren Summers, examining the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876, notes that the expositions put forth two contradictory impressions: an America revolutionized by machinery and invention and an America clinging to traditional values (1).
Celebrating Innovation through AdvertisingSummers indicates that the late nineteenth century was also experiencing another influence upon its values: that of advertising. "Consumers could not escape the marketers, no matter how hard they tried -- not when pennants boosted, billboards boasted, and barn walls, sidewalks, tree stumps, and even river bluffs touted wares" (96). With all the new products rolling off the newly designed assembly lines at a fantastic rate, it became necessary to convince the American public that they needed these products. Julie Rose notes in her website that the World's Fairs themselves had a partly promotional purpose: at the Columbian Exposition, every kind of home appliance or artifact was on sale, from Remington typewriters to phonographs to stained glass.
Below are some advertisements from the times. Some of them are even the same products that Hank Morgan has the idle knights-errant touting on sandwich boards in Connecticut Yankee.
Advertisements
These advertisements were all run either during Mark Twain's lifetime or slightly later.
Celebrating American Ingenuity
Student Home | Teacher Home | Related Links | Bibliography | "Mark Twain in His Times" Website