As president of the Board of Directors, Chairman of the Council of Administration, and member of the Bureau of Admissions and Collections, Mr. Higinbotham held three offices, each involving “heavy responsibilities which could not be delegated, resting upon powers which were ill-defined, yet were co-extensive with the purposes of the company’s incorporation.” For over two years these duties required his entire time—often from twelve to sixteen hours out of the twenty-four—and more than a man’s due share of physical and mental energy.
The story is told with outward completeness in the “Report of the President to the Board of Directors of the World’s Columbian Exposition,” a volume of 323 octavo pages (exclusive of appendices) written in that clear, concise and vivid narrative style which was always at Mr. Higinbotham’s command. Outward completeness only, for one must read between the lines of any formal report to discover the heart-story involved; and in this case, as in all Mr. Higinbotham’s activities, the heart-story was the central motive.
He undertook this public service from the purest instinct of civic pride and loyalty—love of his city and state, pride in the great festival and delight in the ideal involved—its consummation of democracy in beauty representing the union of many creative wills. The Exposition was the first effort of our American democracy to achieve, in any large sense, such a consummation. Thus, to any man of vision, it was prophetic of a new era, and worthy of all that the individual could give. Mr. Higinbotham’s gift was an indomitable will and a mind trained to finance, knowledge of men, quick decision of difficult problems, and unfailing resource in initiative.
One cannot tell the whole long story here, but a few characteristic incidents may be referred to. The electric light contest, for example, illustrates Mr. Higinbotham’s skill and patience in handling would-be profiteers—for public spirit among contractors was not the universal rule. At this time, the spring of 1892, he was vice-president of the Board of Directors, but acting as president in Mr. Baker’s absence. Powerful companies in collusion presented bids averaging $18.00 per incandescent lamp for the six months the Fair was to endure; but by playing other companies against them, and refusing to be stampeded into immediate action, he gradually reduced this bid to $5.95 per lamp, and finally gave the contract to another company at a still lower figure. In the end the sum paid for the entire service was $399,000, as against the $1,675,720, originally demanded.
Indeed the financial history of the Fair was one long series of contests and anxieties for its president. Again and again the enterprise would have failed for lack of funds if the situation had been less skilfully handled; and although failure would have meant national dishonor, the Congress at Washington did not show any proper sense of partnership in a great national festival which was to cost over twenty-eight millions. Instead of the five millions which had been listed for eight months in the appropriation bill and counted upon with reasonable assurance, the government at last, during the hot summer of 1892, compromised on two millions and a half in souvenir coins of uncertain sale; and afterwards, at a moment of imminent financial crisis, it withheld more than a fifth of that sum ($570,880) to pay the expenses of its own department of awards, a department over which the Directory had no jurisdiction whatever.
What this cost the company’s president during the following months of enormous expenditure, when construction bills for material and labor had to be met if the work was to go on, can hardly be estimated. The year from August, 1892, to August, 1893, was a time of incredible strain for the man at the helm. The writer vividly remembers a chance meeting with Mr. Higinbotham in July, 1893. Although she had felt that the attendance thus far was slight, she had not realized the financial issue involved. One glance at the familiar face, however, informed her of the danger; gave her an emotion of anxiety which she will never forget. The face, usually smiling and even tender with friends, was white and stern and drawn; incredibly strong and firm, but cold and hard; the face of a ship captain through a tornado, of a general when the battle seems going wrong; recording a moment when individual emotion was swallowed up in the tragic passion of leadership through imminent disaster.
Fortunately this long and ever increasing strain began to diminish soon after. In August the gate receipts began to creep up, so that the bondholders became less clamorous and the Board of Directors less apprehensive; and the phenomenal “Chicago Day” attendance of October ninth—the twenty-second anniversary of the Fire which a young employe had fought for Field, Leiter & Co.—a day when 761,942 persons went through the turn-stiles, enabled the Treasurer of the Exposition to pay the bondholders in full.
But finances were only one detail, though of course the most important, the most fundamental, to the responsible Company and its president. Other issues involved brought less anxiety and more joy, introducing an infinite variety of experience and motive into the life of a middle-western American merchant. Of these were the president’s relations with the board of architects, those distinguished artists from far and near who designed and built the Fair. In this connection may be mentioned his life-long loyalty to the memory of John Wellborn Root, the first consulting architect, who made the ground plan of the Fair, admittedly a master-piece of great-festival design, but suddenly died—in January, 1891—before he could lead in carrying it out. Mr. Higinbotham, to the end of his life, loyally insisted on ascribing the beauty of the Fair chiefly to the genius of this man, contending always against rival claims and the forgetfulness of time.
The aesthetic and picturesque aspects of the Fair building included also personal relations—which often, to a warm-hearted man like Mr. Higinbotham, became friendships—with painters, sculptors, musicians, even poets; with foreign Commissioners, government and state officials; with eager concessionaires from far and near; indeed with all the various types of human self-interest and idealistic enthusiasm which a vast festival gathers together. In each case the president, in his council of four, must hold the even scales of justice, settling all disputes aesthetic or temporal, and getting or giving a reasonable price for what was granted or secured.
Many of these disputes were little less than agonies to the persons involved, and in these cases Mr. Higinbotham’s quick sympathies became deeply engaged, and he spent over them many hours which should have been given to sleep. One such incident may be briefly dwelt upon, not because it was more important than others, but because it was typical of countless minor disputes which went for final settlement to the Council of Administration, and because the writer, as the author of the poem involved, happens to know about it.