America on Exhibition

THE New York Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1853 was the first American world's fair. Horace Greeley, one of the great Americans of his time, testified to the strength of its impact. was thing to be seen once in lifetime, he recalled. As we grow in wealth and strength, we may build much greater Crystal Palace and accumulate therein more imperial treasures than we could now afford to purchase; but second Fair cannot bring the exhilaration and glory of the first.' This fair was doubly cherished, for in it Americans had created an image of themselves. The Crystal Palace was truly symbol of the country, with all its promises and failures, its glories and meannesses. Like America, like its great poet Whitman, it was a divided, multiple personality, compounded of boundless hopes and dark fears, of daring and caution, of boasts never quite realized. The Exhibition flung challenge to aristocratic Europe even as it deferred to Old World tradition. It bespoke radical utopian vision as well as hard-driven deals, universal human fellowship and the petty calculations of merchants. It stood for the union of the states in face of the issues that were tearing it apart. It was America reaching outward, slowly turning from its dream of isolated splendor in the garden continent of the west.2 So much of the American past-and present-can be read in the story of the Crystal Palace that it is worth rescuing from the limbo to which historians have assigned it

Art · Art history · Exhibition · Media studies · Political science · Sociology · Visual arts · Historical Art and Culture Studies · History

• The Unfinished Revolution

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