I
n 1891, on the muddy southern shores of Lake Michigan, construction began on an almost-city. Not Chicago, just down the shoreline, but the site of what would open, in 1893, as the World Columbian Exhibition. In those two short years, white pavilions, gleaming and gargantuan, emerged on the landscape of what would later be Chicago’s Jackson Park. Yet it wasn’t only the speed with which the exhibition emerged but the scale of its features, some structures breaking historical records of size and interior volume, dimensions previously unimaginable in the nineteenth century.2 Housed within each of the hundreds of buildings on fair grounds were a similarly unimaginable and never before seen quantity and breadth of displays. Even the most abstract statistics give one an idea: twenty seven million visitors came to see the displays by the host nation and of eighty six participating countries, such as fourteen concerts a day, or a library of over 7,000 books, including forty seven translations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin alone.3 This essay will argue that the totally immersive and overwhelming environment of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair can be understood as a total work of art, or a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. This term can mean a synthesis of all the arts, which certainly applies to the Columbian Exhibition, but can also be understood to describe situations in which an audience is so sensorially engaged in an experience that 130