Electricity Building. Mines and Mining Building.
The Burning of the White City.
The financial backers of the Fair showed no mercenary temper. The architects, too, worked with public spirit and zeal which money never could have elicited. Notwithstanding the World’s Fair was not financially a “success,” this was rather to the credit of its unstinted magnificence than to the want of public appreciation. The paid admissions were over 21,000,000, a daily average of 120,000. The gross attendance exceeded by nearly a million the number at the Paris Exposition of 1889 for the corresponding period, though rather more than half a million below the total at the French capital. The monthly average at Chicago increased from 1,000,000 at first to 7,000,000 in October.
The crowd was typical of the best side of American life; orderly, good-natured, intelligent, sober. The grounds were clean, and there was no ruffianism. Of the $32,988 worth of property reported stolen, $31,875 was recovered and restored.
CHAPTER VI.
ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL MOVEMENT
The century from 1790 to 1890 saw our people multiplied sixteen times, from 3,929,214 at its beginning, to 62,622,250 at its end. The low percentage of increase for the last decade, about 20 per cent., disappointed even conservative estimates. The cities not only absorbed this increase, but, except in the West, made heavy draughts upon the country population. Of each 1,000 people in 1880, 225 were urban; in 1890, 290. Chicago’s million and a tenth was second only to New York’s million and a half. Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and St. Louis appeared respectively as the third, fourth, and fifth in the list of great cities. St. Paul, Omaha, and Denver domiciled three or four times as many as ten years before. Among Western States only Nevada lagged. The State of Washington had quintupled its numbers. The centre of population had travelled fifty miles west and nine miles north, being caught by the census about twenty miles east of Columbus, Indiana.
The New York Life Insurance Building in Chicago.
(Showing the construction of outer walls.)
The railroads of the country spanned an aggregate of 163,000 miles, twice the mileage of 1880. The national wealth was appraised at $65,037,091,197, an increase for the decade of $21,395,091,197 in the gross. Our per capita wealth was now $1,039, a per capita increase of $169. Production in the mining industry had gone up more than half. The improved acreage, on the other hand, had increased less than a third, the number of farms a little over an eighth.
School enrollment had advanced from 12 per cent. in 1840 to 23 per cent. in 1890. Not far from a third of the people were communicants of the various religious bodies. About a tenth were Roman Catholics.
Improvement in iron and steel manufacture revolutionized the construction of bridges, vessels, and buildings. The suspension bridge, instanced by the stupendous East River bridge between New York and Brooklyn, was supplanted by the cantilever type, consisting of trusswork beams poised upon piers and meeting each other mid-stream. Iron and steel construction also made elevated railways possible. In 1890 the elevated roads of New York City alone carried over 500,000 passengers daily. Steel lent to the framework of buildings lightness, strength, and fire-proof quality, at the same time permitting swift construction. Walls came to serve merely as covering, not sustaining the floors, the weight of which lay upon iron posts and girders.