Rail-izing the Nation along Lake Michigan: The Wheels a-Rolling Pageant

Rail-izing the Nation along Lake Michigan The Wheels a-Rolling Pageant Jane Barnette In 1948 Chicago hosted a fair to celebrate railroad history, the centerpiece of which was a “colossal pageant” depicting the pivotal role that the railroad industry played in westward expansion and “social progress” of the United States.1 Financed by nearly forty separate railroad companies, the pageant was an unabashed opportunity to seize the spotlight for train culture’s twilight performance.2 A scant three years after World War II, railroad lines were once again desperate for passenger business, after experiencing a boom in passenger and freight services earlier in the 1940s. By the end of this decade, public opinion supported the building of national highways, made possible by the Federal Highway Act of 1944, and railroad companies were “hard hit by the competition from cars and planes and burdened with an inventory of equipment all but worn out by hard use during [the war].”3 More significant, as fellow train culture scholar Kyle Gillette argues, “the Holocaust made trains synonymous with industrialized death.” In the postwar worldview the locomotive was seen by many as a “dehumanizing conveyor belt that carried millions to concentration camps in Germany, Poland, and Austria.”4 To combat this perception, U.S. railroad companies banded together to forge an interactive summer-long fair to commemorate the centenary of train service through Chicago, “the acknowledged railroad capital of the nation.”5 Typical of the fair culture that Chicago epitomized in its 1893 Colombian Exposition and held on the same grounds as its 1933 Century of Progress Exposition (in Burnham Park, alongside Lake Michigan), the stories being told at the Wheels a-Rolling transportation history pageant were defiantly nostalgic while simultaneously idealizing the future. Rail-izing the Nation 57 Much of the performance-related literature about this event concentrates on the serendipitous visit that Walt Disney made to the Chicago Railroad Fair in its first year, during which he was apparently inspired to create his own theme park, Disneyland.6 Other relevant scholarship theorizes the ways that fair culture capitalized on the voyeuristic appeal of exoticized Others. Robert Rydell, for example, demonstrates how world fairs were “triumphs of hegemony,” insofar as they successfully promoted the corporate status quo.7 What has yet to be articulated are the ways that the railroad pageant performance manipulated the public to create a train-centered vision of the United States. In what follows I examine the staging of the Wheels a-Rolling pageant of the Chicago Railroad Fair to consider how the traditionally interior consumer experience of train travel was staged outdoors. Following the tradition of David Nye, who queries the ways “Americans narrated their place in the world and imagined their position in history in technological terms,” my discussion offers insights into how Americans in the Midwest were encouraged to imagine their national, regional, and colonial past through the outdoor (rather than indoor) lens of train culture.8 Drawing from an extant program for the 1949 fair as my primary evidence , along with the critiques provided by cultural historians like Nye and William Cronon, I use the pageant as a case study to query how fair organizers hoped to inspire a surrogate, train-centered version of U.S. history, even in the wake of a burgeoning automobile culture.9 Defining Genres Wheels a-Rolling bears a striking resemblance to earlier railroad pageants held on fairgrounds, as the program recognizes with the attribution, “adapted from a pageant play by Edward Hungerford.”10 Hungerford, who died shortly after the Railroad Fair opened, earned a reputation as an impresario of train culture for his prolific (and irrepressibly positive ) articles and books about locomotion. As the official historian of the Baltimore and Ohio line, he was commissioned to oversee the company ’s centennial fête in 1927. His brainchild, the Fair of the Iron Horse, became the blueprint for two pageants that would, in turn, provide the basis for Wheels a-Rolling. In 1933, at Chicago’s Century of Progress exposition , Hungerford staged Wings of a Century, but “it was left . . . for the New York World’s Fair of 1939 to bring it to the full form of an operatic...