The Crystal Palace
Several weeks ago, My Own True Love and I ventured out into a frozen Chicago to attend an exhibition about the Columbian Exposition at the Field Museum. A meta-exhibit if there ever was one, Wonders of the 1893 World’s Fair deals with the changing nature of how we think about the world around us and the intellectual roots of many of today’s academic disciplines. It takes a quick glance at the colonial (and fundamentally racist) roots of anthropology, but it ignores the fact that the very idea of a World’s Fair was a by-product of British imperialism.
Which brings us to the exhibition popularly known as the Crystal Palace*: the first of the international exhibitions of industry and technology that came to be called World’s Fairs. Organized under the direction of Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, in 1851, the Crystal Palace made no attempt to hide the fact that it was an imperial exhibition. It was explicitly designed to be a celebration of Great Britain’s position as the “workshop of the world”.
Exhibits were requested from all over the world, but over half of the 14,000 exhibits represented Britain and its colonies. A 24-ton block of coal stood outside the entrance, an appropriate symbol of the industrial revolution that the exhibition celebrated. Exhibits included machinery, crafts, fine arts, and wonders such as the Koh-i-noor Diamond, on loan from Queen Victoria herself. The arched Centre Transept housed the world’s largest organ and was used as both circus tent and concert hall. The park surrounding the exhibition hall held copies of statues from around the world, a replica lead mine, and the first exhibition of life-size models of dinosaurs.
The name “Crystal Palace” was coined by the satirical magazine Punch as a commentary on the exhibition hall designed by Joseph Paxton, a gardener with a flair for building glass hot-houses. Built in less than nine months, the exhibition hall was itself a monument to British innovation and technology. Essentially a giant greenhouse, its framework of cast iron columns and girders was built with parts pre-fabricated in Birmingham. The nearly 300,000 panes of glass that made up its walls and roof were larger than anything constructed before.
The exhibition drew over six million visitors between May 1 and October 15. Prince Albert, like many later exhibition promoters who would imitate his event, emphasized its educational value. Most visitors agreed with Punch that the Exhibition was “Britannia’s great party”–and that a good time was had by all.
* It’s official name was the “Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry if All Nations”. Catchy, huh?
Flappers
The flapper of the 1920s took on a mythological character almost from the moment of her birth. With her short hair, short skirts and short attention span, she seemed like a new and unsettling breed of woman, one more aftermath of the First World War.
In Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation, Judith Mackrell explores the phenomenon through the lives of six prominent women who embodied “flapper-ness” for their contemporaries: African-American dancer Josephine Baker, actress Tallulah Bankhead, Lady Diana Cooper, steamship heiress Nancy Cunard, Polish-Russian artist Tamara de Lempicka and Zelda Fitzgerald. These women were not the flapper-next-door; thanks to both their talents and their excesses, they were tabloid fodder. They broke through the social barriers of gender, class, and, in Baker’s case, race–reinventing themselves in the process.
Part of the artistic and intellectual avant-garde, these six women experimented with new social mores and old vices. With no role models to follow, they grappled with the implications of their new independence, with often tragic results. Consequently, Flappers is not short on scandal, but it’s ultimately more than a titillating romp through the Jazz Age. Mackrell uses her larger-than-life subjects to illustrate the story of a generation in transition. She skillfully introduces social history on a personal and global scale, from dress reform and birth control to the demographic effects of the war, and ends with a thoughtful consideration of parallels with the youth culture of the 1960s. Sex, drugs, and red-hot jazz, anyone?
This review appeared previously in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
Shin-kickers From History: Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi
American civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. always claimed, “From my background I gained my regulating Christian ideals. From Gandhi, I learned my operational technique.”
The son and grandson of Baptist preachers in Atlanta, George, Martin Luther King went to Crozer Theological Seminary ready to fight for civil rights but full of doubts about the value of Christian love as a political strategy. He had adopted Reinhold Niebur’s philosophy that social evil was too intractable to be transformed by anything as simple as turning the other cheek.
A speech by Mordecai Johnson, then president of the largely Black Howard University, changed his mind. Johnson had just returned from India and had come back electrified by tales of Mahatma Gandhi’s successful struggle for Indian independence. Fascinated by Gandhi’s use of non-violent non-cooperation as a form of protest, the young theological student bought every book he could find on the Indian leader who had defeated the British empire with passive resistance and a spinning wheel. As he read, he became convinced that Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence was “the only logical approach to the solution of the race problem in the United States.”
King got his chance to apply Gandhi’s tactics for the first time in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. On December 1st, at the end of a long work day as a seamstress in a local department store, Rosa Parks was tired and her feet hurt. She refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus to a white man and was arrested. King, 27 years old and the new pastor of Dexter Street Baptist Church, was thrust into a leadership role in the protest against bus segregation that became known as the Montgomery bus boycott.
Under King’s leadership, the black protest remained orderly and peaceful. For thirteen months, the 17,000 Black residents of Montgomery refused to use the public bus system, even if it meant walking to and from work, adding hours to already long working days.
King and 90 others were arrested and indicted for illegally conspiring to obstruct the operation of a business. Unlike Gandhi and his followers, who accepted arrest as a natural consequence of civil disobedience, King appealed his conviction, thereby keeping his cause in the public eye and gaining a national reputation as a civil rights leader in the process.
In 1959, King made a pilgrimage to India as the honored guest of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who had been Gandhi’s right hand man during the battle for independence from Britain. He returned to the Unites States confirmed in his conversion to non-violence and inspired to follow the example of Gandhi’s satyagraha campaigns, particularly his march to the sea.
King’s approach to non-violent non-cooperation was not identical to Gandhi’s. The Hindu ascetic and the Baptist minister agreed that non-violence succeeds by transforming the relationship between oppressor and oppressed, allowing the powerless to seize power through self-sacrifice. But where Gandhi preached that the practice of satyagraha was rooted in patient opposition, King believed in actively confronting his antagonist.
On January 24, 1998, a statue of Gandhi was unveiled at the Martin Luther King Historical Site in Atlanta, commemorating the philosophical tie between the two men.