Women helped burnish Chicago’s image for Century of Progress World’s Fair 90 years ago

In 1929, a group of socially prominent women pledged to keep the Chicago World’s Fair scheduled for 1933 from being an embarrassing dud. No one asked them to assume that burden. To the contrary, the men who planned it snubbed them.

The city’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 had a Women’s Building designed by a female architect, Sophia Hayden. As the 1933 Fair was planned, the closest thing to a women’s exhibit would have been the epidermis Sally Rand revealed during her notorious fan dance.

Determined something had to be done, in August 1929 the Women’s Chicago Beautiful Association held a planning meeting at the Edgewater Beach Hotel. Forty women were expected. Two hundred representatives of women’s clubs and civic organizations showed up.

The keynote speaker Fay-Cooper Cole, a University of Chicago anthropology professor, saluted the plan for a fair that far exceeded a state fair’s traditional menu. “He said the world has progressed too far for visitors to be interested in competitive displays of pickles and canned fruits,” the Tribune reported.

Dubbing the fair “A Century Of Progress” — measured from Chicago’s municipal incorporation — was a step in the right direction. But selling the city as a center of scientific and artistic achievements had a prerequisite.

The face the city showed the world was “a combination of the beautiful and horrible,” lamented Charles Burkholder, director of the Chicago Art Institute.

To remedy that, the Women’s Chicago Beautiful Association endorsed “a publicity campaign to impress foreign countries with Chicago’s beauty and intellectual spots” and to counteract the ‘hoodlum-gangster stories.’ ”

The undeniable fact was that Al Capone was far and away the most famous Chicagoan. His name rang a bell in far-flung places, where touting the architect Frank Lloyd Wright was more likely to be met with a blank stare.

Ditto Julius Rosenwald, whose merchandizing genius made Sears, Roebuck and Co. a mail order behemoth. Or the writers who prompted a Baltimore newspaper editor, H.L. Mencken, in 1920 to proclaim Chicago “The Literary Capital of the United States.”

Actually, Capone had the flare of a novelist. A bootlegger by trade, he reinvented himself as a businessman with a sense of responsibility for the public good. Other mobsters were shy, witness the iconic photograph of one covering his face with a hat while his lawyer shouts: “No pictures, boys!”

Capone held news conferences. When Chicago’s authorities denied him the traditional courtesy of looking the other way, he claimed he was leaving town.

“Let the worthy citizens of Chicago get their liquor the best they can,” Capone said in 1927. “I’m sick of the job — it’s a thankless one and full of grief. I don’t know when I’ll be back, if ever.”

But things weren’t hunky-dory when Capone was in town, as was noted in the to-do list of the Women’s Chicago Beautiful Association.

Mrs. Henry W. Hardy, president of the Cook County Federation of Women’s Clubs, “declared that before Chicago could ‘come clean’ before the rest of the world, its politics would have to be put under the same rigorous attention as its yards and alleyways.”

Chicago was run by an unholy alliance of office holders and malefactors. It was an unintended side effect of Prohibition that went into effect in 1920. Reducing the supply of booze increased its profitability. Making it illicit lent it a certain cache.

Gang wars were fought over speakeasies, covert drinking establishments tolerated by the authorities—for a price.

Mayor “Big Bill” Thompson bragged that Capone contributed handsomely to his campaign war chest. If Chicago’s reputation was tarnished, he said, it was because the Tribune badmouthed the city with lurid accounts of gangland shootings.

He distributed a million copies of a 16-page brochure titled: “The Tribune’s Lies Have Made The World Believe Chicago is the Crime Center of America.”

He would be an awkward cheerleader for a fair celebrating the power of the human intellect. “We low brows got to stick together,” was Thompson’s political mantra.

As if to prove his qualification, he mounted an abortive voyage of exploration to capture what he claimed were the tree-climbing fish of South America.

Moreover, Thompson was accused of lining his own pockets as president of the 1933 Fair’s predecessor, the “Pageant of Progress,” a trade fair of 1921 and 1922 held on Municipal Pier, as Navy Pier was then known.

He denied the charges but resigned as the pageant’s president when a judge ruled that a city official couldn’t preside over an exposition on city property with profits going to a private company. Concessionaires complained of being shaken down for the privilege of selling ice cream and soft drinks.

In 1931, Thompson was defeated for reelection by Anton Cermak, who saw the city’s image issue eye-to-eye with the Women’s Chicago Beautiful Association.

At a luncheon in the Sherman Hotel’s ballroom honoring notable women — judges, artists, scientists and entrepreneurs — Cermak excoriated Hollywood’s exploitation of Chicago’s gangland heritage. “Little Caesar”, a fictionalized account of a Chicago hoodlum, was being screened at the Uptown Theater.

“I have served notice on theatrical producers and motion picture firms that no more plays or films depicting this city as it has been depicted in the last few years will be permitted to show here,” Cermak said. “And if they continue to make them they will have to find other towns than this to display them. We’ve had more than we want.”

Cermak didn’t get to preside at the fair. He was assassinated a little less than three months before the fair opened on May 27, 1933. But his allies reaped a benefit.

“Feminine participation in the Century of Progress took a long stride forward yesterday,” a Tribune story proclaimed. What followed was an account of a Palmer House meeting of the National Council of Women. It noted the organizations that would be at the fair to “show the world how far women have progressed in the last 100 years.”

Chicago was also fortunate that Prohibition was drawing to a close, albeit by fits and starts. “Beer Ends Dry Era Tonight,” the Tribune reported April 6, 1933.

Legalized beer deprived bootleggers of the incentive to put the muscle on the fair’s concessioners. Chicago’s reputation as a bullet-ridden has-been was superseded by an image of a modern miracle maker.

“The Columbian Exposition was launched upon a wind of enthusiasm,” the Tribune noted of the city’s 1893 World’s Fair. “A Century of Progress has had to battle every inch of the way.”

In 1933, the country was in the depths of the Great Depression. But Chicago’s Fair drew 23 million visitors. Among them was: “A tow headed urchin, 8 years old, clad in blue overalls, rode a box car into Chicago last week,” the Tribune reported. “He started from Murfreesboro, Tenn., and his objective was A Century of Progress.”

There, as elsewhere, people were talking about Chicago’s marvels, and the boy had to see for himself. Found walking the streets, he was taken to a shelter pending arrangements to get him home.

With other visitors filling long empty hotels, Chicago offered hope that lean times wouldn’t be forever. President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked that the Fair be extended for a second year. His wife spoke to its meaning during a visit to Chicago for the fair’s Women’s Day in October 1933.

“I never remember a group of women who were working with me who let me down, " Eleanor Roosevelt said. “Isn’t it possible that this means that we can subordinate ourselves to study what our country needs and then put our shoulders to the wheel?”

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