Pan-American Exposition

From Washington at the turn of the twentieth century, prospects looked good. The United States had gutted Spain’s empire. Its industries were growing swiftly, giving it the world’s biggest economy. Its two richest inhabitants, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, possessed arguably the largest private fortunes in recorded history. Yet what stru

It was, after all, the middle of what historians have termed the “Gilded Age” of American history, a period that stretched from the end of the Civil War until the Great Crash of 1929, marked by unbounded industrial growth and prosperity, and an optimism that was barely dimmed by World War