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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Yes to Esperanto, No to Photos at World’s Fair

Please don't photograph
the Esperanto speakers.

Whenever I find that a tourism venue forbids photography, my immediate thought is that they’re tying to push you to buy the souvenir photo book instead. They don’t want to compete with their vendors. They want to squeeze more tourist cash out of you. Ironically, in some of these places, they have people running about taking flash photos, and I can understand a ban on flash photography. A museum might claim that flash photos can harm artworks (I’ve heard that this is utter bullshit), but more believably, the claim can be made that flash is distracting to other patrons (which is true). But a world’s fair?

But that’s what the organizers of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition did. They announced their ban on cameras on May 10, 1913, while the Expo was still under construction. However, contemporary reports made it clear that the ban continued when the fair was actually opened. And article in the San Francisco Call made it clear that permission to take photographs lay with the Department of Concessions. See, you don’t need to take photos; we have this wonderful souvenir book with professional photography.

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Boosterism for Esperanto

It might have happened.

The Albuquerque Evening Citizen gave over about a column and a half of its October 9, 1906 edition to an article on Esperanto by Silas E. Snyder. Snyder worked in both journalism and advertising; his article was connected with his role in promoting the Jamestown Exposition, the 1907 World’s Fair.[1] While Esperanto doesn’t immediately spring to mind when I think of the World’s Fair, maybe it should, since Esperanto played a role in the 1900 World’s Fair and the 1915 World’s Fair (although that hadn’t been the intention of the Esperanto movement).

Mr. Snyder slipped into his piece on Esperanto that “the Esperantists of the world” were invited to “meet in international congress at the Jamestown exposition,” just as a few years later Sinclair Lewis would seek to convince the Esperanto movement to hold their meeting in conjunction with the World’s Fair in San Francisco. I would lay a solid bet that when committees are organizing these things, they no longer give any thought about coordinating the Universala Kongreso with the World’s Fair.

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Esperanto at the World’s Fair

Ici on parle l'Espéranto?

The 1900 World’s Fair in Paris, is known for a number of things, including an early demonstration of sound film.[1] According to an article in the July 5, 1899 Washington Times, is should also be known as one of the early demonstrations of Esperanto.

In 1899, Esperanto had reached the ripe old age of 12. The first Universala Kongreso was still six years away. And while the Times got a lot of facts about Esperanto wrong, the rather long article devoted to it was on the whole positive. Among all the entertainment of the fair, it seemed that some wanted to get some important work done.

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