Entrepreneurs, heroes and the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago (Columbian Exposition)

 See the book Chicago's White City of 1893 by David F. Burg. Excerpt: 

"It was industrialization that created America's giant cities. And that creation in turn has had pervasive results. "It is impossible to exaggerate the role of business in developing great cities in America, and it is impossible to exaggerate the role of the cities in creating our business culture .... Creating a national market for standardized goods, they also created a national model of the successful man: the thrifty, shrewd, and practical clerk or mechanic who rose from the ranks to leadership."  Probably the single industry most responsible for the evolution of the cities and the model successful man was transportation, namely, the railroads. "If the late nineteenth century [in America] is to be named for any aspect of its technology, there is not a doubt in the world that it should be called the railroad age."  The period was the great age of "railroad imperialism." The rate of growth of the nation's railroads after the Civil War was nothing short of spectacular, in spite of recessions, and "by 1893 ... 150,000 miles [of track] had been laid since the war. Capital invested in American railroads jumped ... from two to nearly ten billion dollars. Though most of this mileage and most of this capital went to complete old trunk lines and their links to new centers in the valleys of the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri, the most spectacular of all the roads and perhaps the most important were the transcontinentals." The growth of these roads gave the nation its heroes, and its villains as well.  It was the railroads that secured the commercial future of such cities as Chicago, Saint Louis, Omaha, and Kansas City by making them into gathering places and distribution centers for the nation's wealth of lumber, iron, wheat, cattle. For close upon the heels of railroad development followed the burgeoning of other gigantic industries in steel, oil, sugar, meat-packing. This was the age of giant trusts which created the fortunes of such incomparable entrepreneurs as steel magnate Andrew Carnegie and oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, prime examples of the rags-to-riches gospel of hard work, thrift, and determination that was preached in the best-selling novels of Horatio Alger. And it was the age of holding companies which were based upon the expertise, machinations, and fortunes of men like the banker John Pierpont Morgan. In short, it was an age in which the industrialist and the banker were the monarchs. "Outside steel and oil, similar combinations were being pushed to completion by Armour and Swift in meat packing, Pillsbury in flour milling, Havemeyer in sugar, Weyerhauser in lumber. By 1893 all had become leaders of great corporations composed in part of shoestring competitors that had fallen in every financial storm." During the thirty years leading up to the World's Columbian Exposition the number of millionaires in the United States had increased from a mere handful to over 4,000.

Not only was the late nineteenth century the age of consolidation, monopoly, multimillionaires; it was also the age of America's rise to industrial supremacy among the nations of the world. By 1893 that supremacy had been achieved. "In the manufacture of timber and steel, the refinement of crude oil, the packing of meat, the extraction of gold, silver, coal, and iron the United States surpassed all competitors. America had more telephones, more incandescent lighting and electric traction, more miles of telegraph wires than any other nation. In specialties like hardware, machine tools, arms and ammunition, she retained the leadership assumed before the Civil War, while her pianos as well as her locomotives had become the best in the world." It would be a few years yet before this rapid and exultant ascent to the pinnacle of industrial might was translated into imperial muscle-flexing; but its internal effects, its influences upon American culture, were pervasive. Most notably, industrial supremacy made secure the power and position of the entrepreneur not only in commerce and finance but also in politics and society, and even in the fine arts. The entrepreneur's public image, his extreme wealth and his conspicuous taste, made him a genuine American hero. The self-made multimillionaire was the man to emulate. He had power, status, mobility; he built mansions and collected artworks; he dominated industries and politicians-and all by means of money. "Thus the ideals of our business leaders became the ideals of the great majority of the people, though only a few were themselves endowed with talent for leadership." Thus also by 1893 America, now primarily a business culture, had attained that orientation which allowed Calvin Coolidge years later to assert, "The business of America is business." The "money ethic" had become a respectable value. "The American people subordinated religion, education, and politics to the process of creating wealth. Increasing production, employment, and income became the measures of community success, and personal riches the mark of individual achievement.,,  The acquisitive society-given to conspicuous consumption and devoted to the Gospel of Success-had taken form, already augmented by a superabundance of goods and by that transformed and growing institution of affluence, advertising. "The Tenth United States Census gives the value of advertisements in the American press in 1880 at $39,136,306, and the next census shows that these figures had increased in 1890 to $71,243,361-a gain of eighty-two per cent in ten years." Moreover, the nature and quality of advertising had changed. It now appeared in streetcars and large billboards; it contained illustrations; the use of color printing was appearing. While modern advertising is quite different, an industry of astronomically greater wealth, than that of the 1890s, its future was already clear.

As the hero of the era, the entrepreneur set the standard of munificence in residential architecture, cultural aspiration, and social pretension. His wealth conferred responsibility. Andrew Carnegie, more enlightened than many of his compeers, had in 1889 already begun to preach what William T. Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, labeled "The Gospel of Wealth"-Carnegie's belief that the rich should live simply and frugally, regarding themselves as caretakers of personal fortunes which they should use for the commonweal. And some titans of wealth were, like Carnegie, often philanthropic, endowing libraries, universities, observatories, museums; but many were given to ostentatious self-aggrandizement. They hired the most prestigious architects to design for them the most renowned residences of the era-indeed,  of any era in American history, for the 1880s and 1890s witnessed a style of residential grandeur that remains unsurpassed. As the palace of a prince made his power readily evident to his subjects, so the mansion of the entrepreneur, the prince of late-Victorian America, revealed his stature. Nor was opulence confined to the houses of the wealthy-on their own scale the middle class displayed their more modest wealth in their residences.

The two sites for the most conspicuous and most profuse display of palatial residences were New York City and Newport, Rhode Island. At both sites the architect nonpareil was the grand old man of American architecture, Richard Morris Hunt. He was the first American architect to be trained in Europe, at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. And it was in his office that the American Institute of Architects was founded in 1857. He was at the height of his fame in the 1880s and early 1890s. He designed more of the great mansions of his time than any architect. His forte was the style of the French Renaissance. Deviating from this style was one of Hunt's most renowned houses, the Breakers, designed in the Italian Renaissance style and constructed in the years 1892-1895 at Newport for railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt. But nearly as famed were several mansions in his favorite style, such as Belcourt, built in 1892 for Oliver H. P. Belmont, son of banking magnate August Belmont, who was one of the few Jews to win acceptance in American society. Also at Newport was Marble House, the Roman-style mansion Hunt designed for William K. Vanderbilt. The same patrons and others besides had hired Hunt to design their New York houses. But Hunt's most imposing and notable work was Biltmore, begun in 1890 and finished in 1895, the Asheville, North Carolina, palace of George Vanderbilt. Designed in the French (Francrois I) chateau style, measuring 500 feet in length, containing 250 rooms, and located on a 120,000 acre tract of land that was laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted, America's greatest landscape architect, Biltmore was a triumph of size and sumptuousness. It was Hunt's masterpiece. Hunt's residential work was confined to the East, but architects and entrepreneurs in other areas of the nation contracted to erect original mansions or imitative versions of Hunt's Newport "cottages." Among them were such nationally known residences as the Charles Crocker house in San Francisco and the Potter Palmer house in Chicago. These great mansions of the age of energy, especially those designed by Hunt, laid claim to international repute and respect."