¡Xicágo!

Two years earlier, in 1891, the new University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology had opened – Stewart Culin was the director. Daniel Brinton, Professor of American Archaeology and Linguistics, chaired the department’s Americas Section between 1892-84 and ‘quickly established a [free] public lecture series… to be delivered either at the Museum or elsewhere as may appear most favourable for interesting the public in the Museum’ (Baker 2000).
Brinton’s role in promoting public education should not be underestimated. In 1884 he had moved to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia (ANSP) – where he set up a successful public lecture series, launched in 1892 (Columbus Day), illustrative of the objects in the American section of the University Museum. He promoted ‘Indian Appreciation’ lectures. ‘Brinton spoke in romantic terms about Native Americans and the unity of races’ (Baker 2000: 400). He was ‘a purveyor of science to the Philadelphia public’ (ibid: 402). ‘Unlike Brinton’s all-male audience at the American Philosophical Society, his audiences at the Academy were virtually all female. Most of his lectures were free and open to the public… His constituents were Philadelphia society ladies. He was often supportive of women who wanted to pursue science, not as an avocation, but as a career’ (ibid: 403).

Pic 1: Daniel G. Brinton

As we outlined in Chapter 3, from May-October 1893 Culin’s games exhibit included Zelia Nuttall’s own private (‘Central American’) game collection, the charts of her reconstruction of the ‘ancient Mexican calendar system’ – and her illustration of Patolli from the Codex Magliabechiano. But there was more. Whilst no comprehensive list exists of all the games Culin exhibited, we know they included ‘paper’ game boards and diagrams from Mexico, and a paper Goose Game (‘Juego de la oca’) from Mexico - probably similar to the one in Picture 3. Amongst the several hundred games curated by Culin in the Penn Museum’s collections today there are a number from ‘Old Mexico’, including several game pieces from the American Philosophical Society, as well as wooden game accessories donated by the explorer Carl Lumholtz; and all displayed ‘in an evolutionary perspective, showing the connections between religion, divination, and games of play’ (Pezzati, n.d.).

Pic 3: A Mexican goose game board (‘Juego de la oca’) dating from close to the time of the WCE in Chicago

‘World exhibitions were the new media of the nineteenth century. They aroused high expectations, in much the same way as the arrival of the internet at the end of the twentieth century. These highly modern, spectacular events attracted huge crowds of visitors from every walk of life, for the first time in history’ (Hinsley & Wilcox 2016: 57). And the WCE was HUGE! ‘A single exhibit hall had enough interior volume to have housed the U.S. Capitol, the Great Pyramid, Winchester Cathedral, Madison Square Garden and St. Paul’s Cathedral, all at the same time’ (Larson 2003: 17). By 1893 Chicago’s population had topped 1m for the first time; during WCE 1,000 trains a day entered or left Chicago. Many brought single young women who… ‘sought work as typewriters, stenographers, seamstresses and weavers’ (ibid: 231). The Fair boasted over 3,000 toilets! (Wilcox 2016: 127). Its cost was estimated at some $10 million (Popular Science Monthly, March 1893).

Pic 5: ‘Grand birds-eye view of the grounds and buildings of the great Columbian exposition at Chicago, Illinois, 1892-3’

And it wasn’t just mainstream popular attractions that caught the eye of the press. The Chicago Sunday Herald (Sept 17th 1893) ran a major piece on anthropology at the Fair, and on the Anthropological Building in particular, and the Chicago Daily Tribune (July 2nd. 1893) spoke of the ‘Wonders of the Ethnological Building’s Sections’, including a lengthy paragraph on Stewart Culin’s ‘Exhibit of Folk Lore’ (picture 7). ‘For those who only heard or read of the Fair from a distance, published images – photographs, paintings, engravings and newspaper line drawings, cartoons – raised suggestive questions about human global variety and relations’ (Hinsley 2016: 239).
A massive outpouring of media coverage, including a ‘bewildering variety of souvenir photo albums and Fair histories’ bombarded the general American public. ‘In this process, from 1891 through 1894 publicists of the Fair constructed a coherent, watertight narrative, running from anticipation through nostalgia and embedding the White City [Chicago] in local and national remembrance’ (Hinsley & Wilcox 2016: 48-9). A general consensus arose amongst US novelists at the time that the WCE would prove to be an ‘unprecedented educational opportunity’ for visitors, a kind of ‘real and broad university’ (ibid 68).

Pic 7: Clippings from the Chicago Daily Tribune of 2/7/1893 praising the WCE

‘Acting as a historical foil to the Palace [of Fine Arts]’s exhibits, the Anthropology Building’s collections of ancient Mesoamerican casts and other artifacts constituted the continent’s pre-European artistic legacy. Situated at opposite ends of the fair’s elevated railway (picture 9), these structures formed the two poles of cultural achievement in the New World; in travelling from one end of the railway to the other, visitors to the exposition figuratively moved through the progressive stages of American civilisation’ (ibid: 158).
In short, you had to go! In the words of leading philosopher of the day William James ‘Everyone says one ought to sell all one has and mortgage one’s soul to go [to the WCE] there; it is esteemed such a revelation of beauty. People cast away all sin and baseness, burst into tears and grow religious, etc., under the influence!’’ (Hinsley & Wilcox 2016: 11). What’s more, ‘the Fair was enormously popular. It seems like almost every American visited it, on multiple occasions.’ (Ira Jacknis, email 1/9/19).
At this point we need to (re-)introduce the ‘star of the whole show’, the inventor of The Landlord’s Game, that was turned into Monopoly, Lizzie Magie.

Pic 9: One of the stations of the WCE elevated railway

It seems Magie didn’t attend School or College, and her highest grade completed was 4th year in High School (1940 Census). Her father had discovered corruption in the state printing business, refused to join the ‘ring’ and ‘the ring eventually drove him from Springfield’. In her own words: ‘At the age of 12, I was obliged to leave school and go to work. I worked as a compositor for a year and meanwhile learned stenography and went to Chicago. I wanted to study literature but as the support of others had devolved upon my shoulders, I was never able to do so’ (Macomb Daily Journal, Oct 17, 1908 - picture 11).
By now she had attended a convention of stenographers with her father, and was already concerned with working conditions in the profession. She found work as a typist in the Dead Letter Office of the U.S. Post Office in Washington; by 1893 this busy department was handling some 20,000 items every day. In early January 1893 - significantly, the year of the WCE - aged 26, Lizzie went to the US Patent Office to patent ‘a gadget that allowed paper to pass through typewriter rollers with more ease’. Her father went too and to witness the act; he had himself invented and patented one or two devices, such as a combination lock (Pilon 2015: 28). Sadly he died just days later.

Pic 11: 1908 newspaper article by Lizzie Magie, herself, and press announcement (15 Jan. 1893) of her father’s death

‘Lizzie travelled in highly political circles. She served as the secretary of the Women’s Single Tax Club in Washington, and counted Henry George Junior, the like-minded son of her single tax idol, as one of her friends’ (Pilon 2015: 26). She taught evening classes on Henry George’s single tax theory (ibid: 30). In fact she remained faithful to the theory all her life, continuing to hold Henry George School of Social Science classes in her home decades later (The Evening Star, Washington DC 28 Jan 1936).
She was talented and experienced in different fields. After work, she wrote poetry and short stories and performed on stage in local Washington theatres (Pilon 2015: 27). Late in 1892 she self-published a book of her poems ‘My Betrothed’, and printed 500 copies (picture 13) (ibid). Three years later she published a short story ‘For the Benefit of the Poor’, in Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, a popular journal (ibid: 29). She also published in Godey’s, a woman’s magazine based in Philadelphia (ibid). But by now she was striving to find new and creative ways to communicate progressive ideas… In particular, she wanted to educate fellow citizens on how to look after the earth. Her message: ‘share the planet’. The focus was on sharing the earth’s resources and on learning from ancient cultures (McFarland, ‘phone conversation, 1/9/07).

Pic 13: Lizzie Magie’s ‘My Betrothed and Other Poems’, 1892

ALL of these interests would be served by her attending the WCE in Chicago! Can we be certain she attended? No, but in my view the probability that she attended is singularly high - a view shared by Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Western Illinois University and local historian, John E. Hallwas (personal communication, 2019).
Let’s go through the bullet points above one by one.

• Stenographer. This was a heyday for the profession. With the mechanisation of communication stenography moved quickly into the spotlight, with reports of a ‘surge in demand’ in the 1880s and 1890s for independent typing and stenographic contractors (Stole, 2010: 174). By 1890 the number of female stenographers and typewriters multiplied nearly ten times to 63% of the total (from 4.5% in 1870), and nationally the number of women in clerical jobs rose by a factor of eight from 1880-1900 (ibid: 65). ‘Women poured into shorthand and typing positions during the last few decades of the century... proving their competence in a new feminine ideal, the turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Woman’ (ibid: 12).

Pic 15: ‘Looking North from the South Colonnade, World’s Columbian Exposition 1893

• Typist/Dead Letter Office/Post Office
Fifteen of the Columbian stamps were released for sale at the start of the new year in 1893, and the Post Office Department mounted a prominent display of the commemorative stamps later that year in an exhibit inside the United States Government Building on the fairgrounds of the World’s Fair. Surely Lizzie would have felt duty-bound to visit?

• Inventor
‘World’s fairs inspired generations of entrepreneurs, artists, inventors, writers, scientists, designers, architects, and everyday citizens’ (Krasniewicz 2015: 13). Several displays were ‘devoted to women inventors and artists’ (Rydell 1993: 156). The Patent Office had a stand in the Government Building. Would Lizzie not have attended the Congress of Patents and Trade-Marks, at WCE, October 2-7 1893?

• Poet/author/actress
Highlight of Poets Day, WCE, August 30th. 1893, was a performance of Shakespeare’s comedy ‘As You Like It’. Wouldn’t Lizzie have loved it?

Pic 17: Plan of the WCE showing location of the Postal Museum and Dead Letter Office exhibit; staff at the Dead Letter Office; one of the Columbian stamps issued in 1893

The very word ‘civilisation’ George associated with ‘cooperation’ (2006: 284). Societal development he found universally to be the antithesis of cooperation - exploitation and inequality. ‘As the population increases, land, and hardly anything else but land, becomes valuable… Land ownership leaves its tax upon all the productive classes. What is the remedy? To make land-owners bear the common burdens – tax land and exempt everything else’ (ibid: 56).
Land policy in the US had historically led to ‘confiscation, and that not in the real interests of the United States, or of any American settlers, but of speculating land sharpers’ (ibid: 34); in California the policy encouraged (US) settlers to squat lands that belonged to a few hundred Mexican grantees (resulting from the US-Mexico Treaty and the US acquisition of California in 1848). The conditions led to California’s ‘land monopoly’ – concentration of land ownership. The population of California rose dramatically from 20,500 in 1848 to 864,694 in 1880. This led to a huge increase in the value of land, with the greatest fortunes being made by holders of real estate.

Pic 19: A rare 1856 silver quarter dollar recently discovered in the California Gold Rush-era sunken treasure recovered from the fabled “Ship of Gold,” the S.S. Central America