Cynicism and Progress: Gullible Devotion to the Prospect of National Automobility

Visitors to the Columbian Exposition of 1893 were encouraged to think of the United States as speeding into an ascendancy driven by the technological wonders on display, including motorized mobility. Architect Louis Sullivan’s Whitmanesque Transportation Building represented progress as the aim and product of mobility technologies. Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis,” delivered at the fair, pointed to America’s pursuit of the frontier as culturally defining while he intimated that the future would be shaped by binding together the disparate regions of the country. Colonel Albert Pope, America’s leading bicycle manufacturer, used the fair to advocate for good roads, arguing that economic prosperity was crippled by bad roads. These exemplars participated in nourishing politicians with an ambitious rhetoric of national prosperity rooted in travel. By contrast, Ida B. Wells Barnett and Simon Pokagon publicly challenged the exposition’s narratives by exposing its root injustices, and L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz would hint that the grand vision of American civilization was arising from a concerted commitment to the self-deception of blind optimism. Picking up Tim Edensor and George Revill’s descriptions of mobility practices leading individuals into social infrastructures that organize national identities, this chapter shows that the prevailing travel stories abounding at the World’s Fair more and less knowingly gloss over compromises of access opportunity, sovereignty tradeoffs, environmental transformation, and labor practices.