트럼프 행정부가 워싱턴 내셔널 몰에 세운 소박한 박람회장이 1893년 시카고 세계박람회(세계 콜럼비아 대박람회)의 미학을 그대로 재현해 화제가 된 배경을 분석한 글입니다. 저자는 6개월간만 열린 박람회가 미국의 정체성, 부, 권력의 상징으로 집단 무의식에 각인된 과정을 추적합니다. 역사적 기억은 중립적 사실이 아니라 각 시대의 재해석을 통해 형성되며, 그 재해석이 세계를 다시 만든다는 통찰을 제시합니다.
번역된 본문
트럼프 행정부가 워싱턴 D.C.에 안겨준 불쾌함 중 가장 기묘했던 것은 지난 7월 내셔널 몰에 급조된 초라한 박람회장이었다. 용도에 맞지 않게 흘러간 기부금으로 살 수 있는 최고급 스티로폼과 비닐로 만들어진 이 박람회장의 디자인은 1893년 세계박람회와 그 모방작들의 비현실적인 신고전주의 건물군을 떠올리게 했다. 어떤 면에서 이 선택은 직관적이다. 세계 콜럼비아 대박람회는 미국의 부, 권력, 정체성을 거창하게 표현한 행사였고, 문화 창작자들은 이를 몇 번이고 되돌아보며 매료되어 왔다. '미국을 다시 위대하게'라는 슬로건이 떠오르지 않는가? 하지만 반대로, 단 6개월 만에 끝난 축제가 어떻게 미국의 정신에 그토록 깊이 박혀 들어갔을까? 왜 우리는 내셔널 몰에 그것을 축소판으로 다시 세웠는가? 왜 그것은 억압된 영광스러운 과거에 관한 하나 이상의 음모론의 특징이 되었는가? 왜 모든 팹스트 블루 리본 캔에 그 흔적이 새겨져 있는가? 우리는 줄곧 미국의 장엄함을 위한 이 석고 팝업 광고를 생각해왔던 것일까? 이 모든 질문에 대한 답은... 내가 생각했던 것보다 더 기묘하다. 1893년을 돌아보든 1993년을 돌아보든, 하나의 사건, 이야기, 이미지가 우리를 끌어당기는 것은 그 사건의 맥락보다는 우리가 처해 있는 맥락에 더 크게 좌우된다. 그 결과 우리는 선대들과 다르게 과거를 해석하거나, 다시 상상하게 된다. 그리고 세계 콜럼비아 대박람회의 지속되는 기억은, 중립적인 사실이 아니라 바로 이러한 재상상으로부터 우리가 세계를 다시 만들어낸다는 것을 보여준다고 나는 생각한다.
새롭고 개선된 예루살렘
박람회에 관해 어떤 역사학자도 이의를 제기하지 않는 측면 하나는, 그것이 《쥬라기 공원》(1993)의 공룡들처럼 사람들의 정신을 뒤흔들었다는 점이다. 1893년 5월 개장 전부터 호평이 쏟아지기 시작했고, 그해 10월 폐막 이후에도 한참 오래 이어졌다. 기사들, 전보들, 일기들이 모두 그 경이로움을 증언했다. 그 후 수년간 정식 판매 상품과 불법 복제 상품 모두 잘 팔렸고, 새 세기가 될 때까지 응접실을 어지럽혔다.
온갖 부류의 작가들이 그 매력의 다양함을 목록으로 만들어 왔다. 이제 막 도시 인구가 과반수가 된 국민에게 시카고 자체가 하나의 볼거리였다. 하이드파크의 유리 지붕 전시장들은 카탈로그와 신문이 광고의 전부였던 환경에서 제조업체들에게 더없는 홍보 효과를 제공했다. 박람회의 미드웨이에서 방문객들은 카니발 볼거리에 즐거워했고, 인종지학적 전시들은 인류에 대한 통념을 흔들었다. 하지만 그 무엇보다도 사람들의 기억에 더 오래 남은 것은 박람회의 중심 건물군이었다. 공식 명칭은 '명예의 광장(Court of Honor)', 통칭 '하얀 도시(White City)'였다. 그것은 낮에는 빛나고 밤에는 웨스팅하우스 전등의 호화로운 조명으로 빛나는 기념비적 석고 외관의 건물군이었다. 그리고 전기는 여전히 '새로움의 충격'으로 찬란했다. 수백 개 단체가 그 외관 뒤에서 연례 회의를 열었고, 전체 미국인의 거의 3분의 1이 방문했다.
하얀 도시에서 교차한 모든 경로를 추적하는 것은 불가능하다. 어떤 사람들은 감탄하고 기념품을 사서 집에 돌아갔다. 다른 이들은 변혁을 겪었다. 그러한 순례자 중 한 명은 찰스 멀퍼드 로빈슨이라는 저널리스트였다. 1897년 공식 박람회사에서 그는 명예의 광장에 들어서는 경험을 일종의 자아 소멸과 같은 것으로 묘사했다. "모든 감각이 깨어 있었다. 그는 자신을 잊었거나 자기 인격의 한계가 미끄러지듯 사라져 넓게, 끝없이 확장되어 장 전체가 그의 영혼 안에 들어오는 것을 느꼈다. 그것이 박람회의 첫 번째, 분석되지 않은 인상이었다. 예술가, 건축가, 시인만의 인상이 아니라 평범한 사람의 인상이었으며, 그는 자신이 결코 알지 못했던 무한한 깊이의 존재를 탐구하고 있었다."
디자인에서 비현실적인 것을 본 것은 그가 혼자가 아니었다. 1895년, 《비밀의 화원》의 작가로 더 잘 알려진 프랜시스 호지슨 버넷은 동화 우화인 『두 꼬마 순례자의 여정: 아름다운 도시 이야기』를 출간했다. 이 짧은 책은 두 고아 아이들이 그 도시를 방문하는 이야기를 따라간다.
Of all the displeasures that the Trump Administration has brought upon the District of Columbia, the most peculiar was the dinky little fairgrounds thrown up on the National Mall this past July. Crafted from the finest styrofoam and vinyl that misdirected donations can buy, its design unmistakably evoked the otherworldly classical ensembles of the 1893 World's Fair and its imitators. In some ways, the choice is intuitive. The World's Columbian Exposition was an exuberant expression of American wealth, power, and identity that cultural creators have returned to with fascination again and again. Make America Great Again, right? But on the other hand, how did a festival that lasted only six months lodge itself so deeply in the American psyche? Why did we rebuild it in miniature on the National Mall? Why has it become a feature of more than one conspiracy theory about a suppressed glorious past? Why is its discernment invoked on every can of Pabst Blue Ribbon? Have we always been thinking about this plaster pop-up advertisement for American majesty? The answer to all of these questions is... stranger than I had thought. Whether thinking back to 1893 or 1993, what draws us to an event, story, or image depends less on the context of the events than the context we inhabit. As a result, we interpret—or reimagine—the past differently from our predecessors. And I think the lingering memory of the World's Columbian Exposition shows how it's from these reimaginings, not neutral facts, that we reshape the world. A New and Improved Jerusalem One aspect of the fair that no historian will dispute is that, like the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park (1993) , it blew people's minds. Raves about the Exposition had begun even before it opened in May 1893 and continued well past its closure in October of that same year. Articles, telegrams, and diaries all testified to its wonder. For years after, both licensed and bootleg merchandise sold well, cluttering parlors into the new century. Writers of all stripes have catalogued the diversity of its appeal. For a population that had only just become majority urban, Chicago was an attraction in and of itself. Down in Hyde Park, the glass-roofed exhibit halls offered unbeatable publicity to manufacturers in an advertising environment of catalogues and newsprint. Over at the fair's Midway, visitors delighted in its carnival attractions while its ethnographic displays shook assumptions about humanity. More than any of that, however, what lingered longer in people's memory was the central complex of the fair. Known officially as the "Court of Honor," and colloquially as the "White City," it was an ensemble of monumental plaster facades that shone in the daytime and glowed after dark in a lavish display of Westinghouse electric light—still radiant with the shock of the new. Hundreds of organizations held their annual meetings behind its facades and nearly a third of all Americans visited. It is not possible to trace every path that crossed in the White City. Some people were wowed and went home with the merch. Others were transformed. One such pilgrim was a journalist named Charles Mulford Robinson. In the 1897 official history the fair, he described the experience of entering the Court of Honor as something like an ego death: The faculties were all alert; he forgot himself or he felt the limits of his own personality slipping away, extending widely, boundlessly, until the whole scene was in his own soul. That was the first, unanalyzed impression of the Fair; not the impression merely of the artist, the architect, or the poet, but of the everyday person, sounding infinite depths whose existence he never had known before. He was far from alone in seeing the otherworldly in the design. In 1895, Frances Hogson Burnett, better known as the author of The Secret Garden , published a children's parable, Two Little Pilgrims' Progress, A Story of the City Beautiful . The short book follows two orphan children as they visit the fair while reading the 17th century Christian allegory Pilgrim's Progress . In Burnett's retelling, the spiritual journey is a physical one. The Celestial City that serves as Pilgrim's aim in the fable, it turns out, was right there on the shores of Lake Michigan, reached for reasonable fare. Contemporary reviews of the book were mixed. None that I have found, however, objected to the comparison she made between this for-profit festival and actual literal Heaven. On to the next one Here's another question. How much do you think about the Barcelona Summer Olympics ? Woodstock '94? Michael Jackson's halftime show at Super Bowl XXVII? Each of these brief events from roughly thirty years ago was deeply influential in its own time and on the industries they were part of. Yet I think it's safe to say that they don't hold our memory as well as media from 1993 like Whitney Houston's rendition of I Will Always Love You or Stephen Ambrose's A Band of Brothers . Events are definitionally less tangible and less accessible. The memory itself persists more in more the fragments of souvenirs. The historian David Burg counted over a dozen novels featured the Fair as a setting or even plot device over the following decades. Some reveled in its heyday; others frolicked in its ruins. In most cases, it was a setting or even a plot device, not the character that Burnett made it. On the other side of the First World War I, the only people who seem particularly interested in the fair are urban planners. Seeing it as the spark for their movement, they approached it with historical, rather than immediate, reverence. Like the general public, their eyes were focused on the unfolding of modernity. As charted by economist Robert Gordon, the technology that had seemed magical in 1893 grew increasingly mundane. Its aesthetics, on the other hand, looked quainter with every year. Not only was there no jazz at the Columbian Exposition, there wasn't even ragtime. When Chicago again hosted a World's Fair in 1933, it invoked its predecessor primarily to emphasize just how far they had come in two generations. Perhaps the clearest illustration of the Exposition's faded mystique is its absence in the artistic medium that dominated the 20th century. From the establishment of the first studio in Hollywood in 1912 until 2017, only a single major motion picture covered the Fair—and even then, it dramatizes the Midway, not the White City. It's a biopic of skimpresario Florenz Ziegfeld featuring Myrna Loy as Billie Burke, who herself was about to achieve immortality for introducing the world to another fantasy city—this one, Emerald . Honestly, I was surprised at how thin the fair's top-line cultural impact was for most of the 20th century. Not that I did a truly exhaustive search, but outside of Chicago it was a topic for the history books and apologetic statements by urban planners, especially when compared to the city's dark side. Only PBR, it seems, held to the faith . The dream of the 90s was the dream of the 90s Things changed in the 1990s. The centennial of the Fair in 1993 summoned a host of books, local TV documentaries , and exhibits. Still, these might not have added up to much, if a cartoonist named Chris Ware hadn't broken his legs. Unable to walk for weeks, he read up on Chicago's history and began to incorporate some of this background into the strip he ran in the local alt weekly (what could be more 90s than that?). Definitively published in 2000, Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth , features multiple sequences set at the fair. More so than almost any work since Burnett's fable, it shows the White City as a space of unmatched wonder. The ornate structures fill page after panel and from every angle. Ware's style draws heavily from severe technical drawing and slick advertisements. Yet rather than dulling the grandeur of the Roman designs, it makes them look Platonic—celestial even. Ultimately, though, it looks like the revival of interest in the