Esperanto at the 1904 World’s Fair

It's a nice column head.

There seemed to be a running association between Esperanto and the World’s Fair, just one of those newfangled things of the twentieth century. You know, electricity, ice cream cones, Esperanto. It’s really something more minor than would be indicate by the article in the New-York Tribune on July 3, 1904. It’s not like there was a concurrent Esperanto congress (that would happen in 1915), or even a discussion of the choice of an international language (which had occurred without result in 1900) and it’s likely that many of the people who attended the Louisiana Purchase Exposition had no idea of the presence of Esperanto, as it seems much more limited than the Tribune indicated.

The Fair had stared on April 30, 1904, so it was in full swing by the time the Tribune reported on it. The Tribune also covers the spread of Esperanto to that point. In 1904, the number of Esperanto clubs in the United States was a solid zero; no one would form one for more than a year. However, the Tribune notes that both the Harvard University library and Boston Public Library already had books about and in Esperanto as early as 1904 (a time when every single book and pamphlet published in or about Esperanto would have been a short shelf).

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