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By the 1880s revivalist Dwight L. Moody was approaching the latter years of a successful evangelistic career in both Europe and the United States. In 1889, Moody was returning to the States from Europe when the drive shaft on his ship, the German Lloyd S.S. Spree, malfunctioned and punctured the hull. The revivalist later recounted that as the ship floundered in the dark waters of the Atlantic, he struck a bargain with the Almighty. “If God would spare my life and bring me back to America,” Moody later recalled, “I would come back to Chicago and preach the gospel with all the power that He would give me.”1 Chicago was Moody’s home base. His early years with the YMCA and later as the founder of the Chicago Evangelization Society had won him many supporters in the city. By 1889, Moody had become much more than a Chicago persona: he was the most celebrated evangelical revivalist in the United States and England. Now he was coming home. His mid-Atlantic encounter with God brought him back to conduct one more battle for Chicago’s soul. In that same year, Democratic Mayor DeWitt C. Creiger proposed another way to arouse the city’s moral sensibilities. Mayor Creiger selected a one-hundred-member, blue-ribbon committee whose mandate was to persuade the U.S. Congress to grant the upcoming World’s Columbian Exposition to Chicago. With “supervoluminous civicism,” Creiger’s committee peddled Chicago’s unique blend of the West’s raw, unrestrained 63 Chapter 2 “Sow the Wind, Reap the Whirlwind” The 1893 World’s Fair Campaign 1. J. Ritchie Bell, “Reminiscences of D. L. Moody Saved from Death on the Atlantic,” Institute Tie, November 1905, 73–74; Williams, Life and Work of Dwight L. Moody, 272. “On Guard.” Ram’s Horn, June 21, 1893. energy with the East’s culture and sophistication. The panel argued that the city’s population, which now numbered more than a million, pulsed with “complex human energy” and could accomplish “Herculean feats.” What better place to celebrate the young and vibrant nation whose discovery the fair was to commemorate?2 Chicago boosterism surpassed even the pressure of the New York lobby, and Chicago won the privilege of hosting the World’s Fair. Fair planners designed the World’s Fair Exposition to be a uniquely Chicago-style celebration of America’s discovery. Throughout 1892, elaborate buildings and exhibits slowly transformed what had been an undeveloped mud flat in the Jackson Park area into a sparkling White City, an extravagant display of the technological and humanitarian advances of the nineteenth century to highlight the century’s intellectual and ethical advances and to create a once-in-a-lifetime event of enlightenment and world unity. Fair organizers coordinated an array of international conferences featuring the world’s most eminent spokespersons in philosophy, religion , and reform causes. Hopes for the fair and its potential to accomplish good were enormous. Supporters argued that the fair would unquestionably demonstrate the superiority of Western thought and industry and, at the same time, transform lesser, “uncivilized” peoples with its sheer display of Western achievement. Evangelicals and the Chicago World’s Fair Chicago evangelicals had misgivings about the fair; their enthusiasm was tempered by the fair’s potential for excess and sin. Chicago continued to represent “a peculiar field for evangelistic work,” a city whose “primary interest in commerce led only to irreligion and little moral restraint.” These believers feared that the exposition would, in all probability, accelerate the less desirable trends already at work and deepen the city’s social and moral disorder. One of their central concerns was that the fair would further intensify Chicago’s ongoing love of money. As Chicago’s manufacturing and retail sectors flourished, her raucous business climate continued to challenge the economic values of evangelicals who believed in the virtue of hard The 1893 World’s Fair Campaign 65 2. Lewis and Smith, Chicago: The History of Its Reputation, 189–90; David F. Burg, Chicago’s White City of 1893, 42. work committed to the glory of God. According to the evangelical work ethic, one was to take profits honestly and spend them frugally. Such virtues were hard to find in Chicago’s economy. Preaching to his Ravenswood Methodist Episcopal congregation, the Reverend J. P. Brushingham expressed evangelical concern. “All kinds and conditions of mankind come to a great city,” he said, “mainly for one purpose—money getting, honestly or dishonestly .” The British journalist, William T...

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