An Uncertain Triumphalism

Coming soon, on July 4, 2026—and impossible not to notice—is the United States’ semiquincentennial: the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The celebrations began last year, when the Ken Burns documentary on the American Revolution aired, and it was followed by a slew of books about the Founding Fathers, female patriots, the Fourth of July, and of course the Declaration itself. That’s not to mention an upcoming summer of local and national festivities that promises fireworks, parades, bands, speeches, prizes, and commemorative everything, from postage stamps and coins to musical compositions.

There’s an inevitable triumphalism in all this rejoicing, and that was certainly also true in 1876 during the nation’s centennial. And yet, then as now, not everyone believed that the US had come close to realizing its glorious ideals. Though the Civil War had ended more than a decade earlier, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison recognized that the Declaration had not yet fulfilled its promise of inalienable human rights. “The South is still insolent and brutal to the race it once held in abject bondage,” he said, and as for the North, it seemed either in sympathy with the South or not to care.

Nevertheless, in the early 1870s, Congress established the United States Centennial Commission and then a board of finance to raise $10 million in private shares to be sold to the public. The goal: bankrolling a grand exhibition to showcase the country’s unity and its inventiveness and, not coincidentally, to provide it with the economic boost it sorely needed. The US had barely recovered from the Panic of 1873, when banks failed, railroad construction halted, and as many as 18,000 textile factories, iron mills, and other businesses folded. But in 1876 tourists would flock to Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, the site of the Centennial Exhibition. And because this was to be an international exhibition, or world’s fair, Europeans would see that the US was no longer a gaggle of small colonies or a newish country barely recovered from a devastating civil war. “Away with themes of war!” Walt Whitman implored in “Song of the Exposition,” the poem he submitted for the Centennial Exhibition.

Soon the buzz was palpable, even creating what one pundit called “Centennial mania.” Yet at the same time “rottenness has seemed to be everywhere,” a journalist lamented. The famed preacher of Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church, Henry Ward Beecher, had been on trial for adultery. The commissioner of Indian affairs, Ely Parker, the first Native American to hold that office, was unfairly suspected of having purchased cattle and supplies without advertising for bids, and decided to resign. Interior Secretary Jacob D. Cox, a civil service reformer who disapproved of the spoilsmen lurking around the White House, resigned in frustration, while his replacement, Columbus Delano, was soon accused of selling inferior goods to Native Americans. Then the disgraced secretary of war, William W. Belknap, was impeached by the House of Representatives, even though he’d already been forced to step down for influence peddling in the West. And it was an election year.

The prolific historian Fergus M. Bordewich, the author, most recently, of Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction (2023),¹ thus considers the Centennial Exhibition something of a sham. In his new book, Centennial: The Great Fair of 1876 and the Invention of America’s Future, he argues that the celebration presented America “as the country’s industrial magnates wished it to be, an expansive vision of a glittering consumerist future at a time of industrial turbulence, political anxiety, and rapid change.” In his view, the great fair treated history

as a gilded chamber of mirrors that flattered and reassured, reflecting back to Americans what they most wished to be true about themselves, assuring them that they lived in an ever-triumphant nation, not a deeply fissured one.

Bordewich’s aim, then, is to reveal the fissures that the fair sought to conceal from its almost 10 million American visitors.

If the Centennial Exhibition was largely a diversion that deliberately entertained “by omission,” as Bordewich suggests, fairgoers could not avoid knowing of, if not experiencing firsthand, the nation’s roiling confusion, rampant corruption, and anxious bravado in the aftermath of war and recession. The future was not certain. “Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation,” the English scientist Thomas Henry Huxley warned Americans during his popular centennial tour. Known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his vehement public defense of the theory of evolution, Huxley escapes Bordewich’s notice even though the national press covered his prescient speeches. “The great issue,” he asked the nation, “is what are you going to do?”²

As if in reply, Bordewich sees the Centennial Exhibition as a “theater of national glory” and a Barnumesque festival of “muscular triumphalism” that purposefully avoided the country’s failure to fulfill its promise. Almost 100,000 people attended the opening—among them university students, New York dandies, West Point cadets, and westerners—many arriving in special trains built for the occasion and “most of them,” Bordewich writes, “expecting to be inspired by the country’s achievements and hoping to be uplifted by evocations of its history.” (Reportedly, Black men and women were encouraged to show up on special visiting days.) Inside Machinery Hall, President Ulysses S. Grant helped set into motion the gigantic Corliss engine that supplied power to the eight thousand machines in the hall, which itself covered fourteen acres. It was forty-five feet tall, weighed 1,320,000 pounds, and had been brought to Philadelphia in sixty railroad cars. Bordewich writes that it signified a mammoth industrial culture that “prized efficiency over the already frayed dignity of human labor, and the advent of violent class conflict.”

And of course there were American artifacts everywhere: George Washington’s buckskin breeches, John Paul Jones’s sword, Benjamin Franklin’s chess set, and John Alden’s writing desk, as well as a sculpture made of butter, a self-heating iron, and the detached arm of Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty, which after the exhibition closed headed to New York. Next to the Women’s Pavilion was a working kindergarten “replete with orphaned girls and boys recruited from a local orphanage.” In the US Government Building, there were spears, arrowheads, totem poles, buffalo-skin tepees, a Peruvian mummy, war feathers, and war clubs, all displayed helter-skelter in almost souvenir-like fashion, as if, Bordewich writes, to reduce

Native peoples to a cartoon-like cliché of savagery which blinded white Americans to the aggression that was being perpetrated against tribes that were still struggling, and mostly failing, to somehow come to grips with the onrushing modern world of the nineteenth century.

No one seemed more impervious to or uninterested in the dark underside of US triumphalism than the novelist William Dean Howells, whose response to the exhibition, Bordewich claims, affords a “tour [of] the American mind of the time.” At thirty-nine, Howells was the editor of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly, a high-minded paragon of respectability. An easy target for satire, he saw exactly what he wanted to see: “proof in steel, marble, and glass that the United States had come proudly of age,” Bordewich observes. Even though he’d lived in Italy, the provincial Howells regarded the Italian exhibits as “a rather poverty-stricken effort of bric-a-brackishness.” He much preferred the displays of Ohio hams, the pyramids of Kentucky tobacco, and the mowing and reaping machines.

Yet it’s also true that thirty-seven nations participated in the Centennial Exhibition, many of them building their own pavilions. There was a Japanese pavilion with a formal garden, a Chinese pavilion featuring carved mahogany furniture and maritime products such as dried squid and shark fins, and a Turkish café where coffee was served in small cups. Norway brought silverwork, and the French exhibited Aubusson carpets and the stained glass later headed for St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. The opening ceremonies included a grand march composed not by an American but by a German, Richard Wagner; his fee was paid by the various Women’s Centennial Committees, which intended to head off anything as “crude” as “Yankee Doodle” trumpeted by brass instruments. And when President Grant first appeared, he was flanked by the emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro II—in spite of the irony of having a monarch as well as an elected head of state on the dais.

Regardless, Bordewich is determined to highlight—and puncture—the Centennial Exhibition’s self-satisfied and benighted nationalism, so he focuses on a quartet of figures associated with it. The Scottish-born Alexander Graham Bell had patented a device that would soon alter commercial and human relationships—not that he had intended to. It was his fiancée who insisted that he bring what he considered his “invention in embryo” to Philadelphia. But a stunned crowd that included Dom Pedro soon heard Bell recite part of Hamlet’s soliloquy through a receiver placed in a distant room. One year later, in July 1877, the Bell Telephone Company was formed, and within a month some eight hundred phone lines were operating.

In Bordewich’s view, Bell represented the exhibition’s amalgam of “imagination, entrepreneurship, big business, and social impact.” So did Tom Scott, though in a far different key. As president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Scott was such a ruthless corporate empire builder that even his fellow empire builder John D. Rockefeller called him unscrupulous. During the Civil War he had pioneered the construction of railroad lines to deliver ammunition, reinforcements, and provisions to the Union army—at exorbitant rates. By the time of the centennial, his railroad controlled some 6,500 miles of track. Naturally Scott lobbied for the exhibition to be held in Philadelphia. His coaches would bring millions of visitors, some of them in luxury cars, to the fair. Bordewich points out that Howells, one of them, was a very contented passenger.

Scott also purchased southern newspapers, and in pursuit of profit he had no compunction about working with the so-called Redeemer Democrats, who utterly abrogated Black and Republican civil rights, often through intimidation, violence, and assassination. Redeemer governments in the South help explain why Rutherford B. Hayes appears in Bordewich’s gallery of exemplary figures. This former Union general, loyal Grant supporter, and nondescript governor of Ohio was a quietly rising star in the Republican Party, which had lost such sterling abolitionists as the Pennsylvania representative Thaddeus Stevens and, most recently, the stentorian Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, who died two years before the exhibition opened.

Having worked hard for the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave Black males the right to vote, the resolute, honest, and somewhat colorless Hayes was nominated for president on the Republican ticket in 1876 mainly because he was a safe choice and particularly because he’d promised that he wouldn’t run for a second term. Always cautious, he worked hard never to say anything he might regret. His fellow Ohioan Howells (a relation by marriage) produced a campaign biography praising his modesty, courage, and heroism—and noting that when Hayes served on the committee to purchase items for the Smithsonian Institution, “no vote of his ever favored the purchase of trashy pictures or sculptures.”

Hayes visited the fair only twice: once as one of the dignitaries invited to celebrate the Fourth of July and then, shortly before the election, on “Ohio Day,” when he delivered an unremarkable speech. But to Bordewich, he, too, symbolizes the partisanship, prejudice, and polarization expunged by the chest-thumping fair, which deceived its visitors and both ignored and embodied “the troubling fissures of race and class and gender.”

Consider the fourth member of Bordewich’s quartet: the Black sculptor Edmonia Lewis, who claimed to be part Chippewa and who shared with Bell and Scott “the spirit of a rapidly changing America that celebrated self-invention, unshackled entrepreneurship, and creative individualism.” A savvy entrepreneur who knew how to exploit (or fictionalize) her background, she evidently desired to live “as an artist and as a free woman, who happened incidentally to be Black, or Indian when called for.” By 1870 she was wealthy, her work was in great demand, she had been awarded a gold medal by King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy, and her studio, near the Piazza Barberini, was a must-see for Americans visiting Rome.

For the Centennial Exhibition, she produced The Death of Cleopatra, which apparently Howells somehow missed. Weighing more than three thousand pounds and more than five feet high, Lewis’s Cleopatra was dying slumped on her throne, the deadly asp in her hand. Bordewich notes that this Cleopatra was “racially ambitious” like Lewis, “with classically European features and with no obvious reference to her ‘African’ aspect.” (One viewer thought she looked Jewish.) Lewis wanted $30,000 for the sculpture. It did not sell.

While the writer Lydia Maria Child hopefully saw in Lewis “how the lines of demarcation between classes and races are melting away,” Bordewich regards the sculptor’s decision to spend her life abroad as an indictment of America. “The land of liberty had no room for a colored sculptor,” Lewis explained in 1878. “Her life was daring and original, but she could not live it in the land of her birth,” Bordewich adds. “Negotiating a path between the abolitionist and the post-Reconstruction future,” Lewis had to know that to be judged by her work alone was “a perhaps impossible ambition in the America of the late 1870s.”

Still, even if the Centennial Exhibition was more self-congratulatory than self-critical, more commercial than collaborative, it couldn’t really camouflage the demand for a nation more fair, more just, and more in line with the sentiments of 1776. Bordewich shrewdly notes that on the morning of July 4, 1876, as political and military luminaries as well as international guests sat on the main stage in front of Independence Hall to celebrate and Robert E. Lee’s cousin read from the Declaration of Independence, Susan B. Anthony and four other women marched up to the platform to hand over an alternative “Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States, July 4, 1876.” At Independence Square, Anthony then read:

The history of our country the past hundred years has been a series of assumptions and usurpations of power over woman. For the violation of these fundamental principles of our government, we arraign our rules on the Fourth day of July, 1876.

Nor could the exhibition blot out the shocking news of what was soon called the “Last Stand.” As Bordewich recounts, on June 25, the flamboyant and seemingly invincible General George Armstrong Custer (“the very incarnation of Manifest Destiny”) and his Seventh Cavalry had gone down to total defeat—and, as it would turn out, conspicuous celebrity—at the hands of the Lakota Sioux. “Beneath the soaring patriotic rhetoric of the Centennial year,” Bordewich writes,

for many Americans, ingrained belief in the biological and moral superiority of the white race was fusing with a sense that class differences, too, were elemental, and that pity for the suffering poor, white or Black, was merely soft-minded.

The exhibition is thus the occasion, if not the excuse, for his larger critique of America in 1876. Accordingly, he devotes an entire chapter to the coal miners of Pennsylvania, where a secret society of Irish radicals known as the Molly Maguires was allegedly assassinating mine owners and bosses. He discusses the first national strike in American history, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, when Tom Scott refused to negotiate with the strikers and somehow managed to call up Philadelphia militiamen, who killed at least twenty of them in Pittsburgh. After the strikers set fire to the railroad yards, boxcars, and grain elevators, Scott appealed to President Hayes, who considered the strike “insurrectionary” and authorized the use of federal troops to put it down.

The election of Hayes in 1876 had not been uncomplicated. When the Centennial Exhibition closed on November 10, the results of the presidential election were still up in the air. Hayes’s Democratic opponent, Samuel Tilden of New York, was famous for having taken down the Tweed Ring. Though he had ostensibly won the popular vote, he didn’t have the 185 electoral votes needed to win the election, and Republican-appointed election boards in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina were challenging the returns.

Rival sets of electors had been submitted to Congress. (Sound familiar?) Some electors were invalidated, and some states submitted more than one set of returns. The unprecedented situation was so bewildering and tense that people in Washington and throughout the nation began to fear the outbreak of another civil war. Both Republicans and Democrats were trying to buy electoral votes. In addition there was intimidation of Black voters, widespread fraud, alleged terrorism, and the seizure of city courts.

With the help of both Republican and Democratic leaders, President Grant signed into law the creation of an electoral commission charged with counting the disputed electoral votes from the three southern states. Bordewich nicely untangles the contested election and the so-called Compromise of 1877, the bargain that put Hayes in the White House. As part of it he promised the southern states home rule, which implied, among other things, the abandonment of Southern Republicans and Blacks and ensured the end of Reconstruction.

President Grant closed the Centennial Exhibition with a typically terse announcement; the time had come to shut down the Corliss engine. Bordewich does not chronicle its fate. The engine was stored in Providence, Rhode Island, until George Pullman purchased it to run one of his railroad factories, but in 1910 the formerly mighty monster, having become obsolete, was scrapped. By then a far less platitudinous Howells had bravely condemned the execution of four of the anarchists charged with fomenting the 1886 Haymarket Square riot in Chicago. In mourning them, he could have been evoking the centennial’s unfulfilled pledge: “They died, in the prime of the first Republic the world has ever known, for their opinion’s sake.”