Louisiana Purchase Exposition - Notable Visitors

Notable Visitors

Notable attendees included John Philip Sousa, whose band performed on opening day and several times during the fair. Thomas Edison is claimed to have attended. President Theodore Roosevelt opened the fair via telegraph, but did not attend personally until after the election in November 1904, as he claimed he did not want to use the fair for political purposes.

Ragtime music was popularly featured at the Fair. Scott Joplin wrote "The Cascades" specifically for the fair, inspired by the waterfalls at the Grand Basin, and presumably attended the fair.

Helen Keller, who was 24 and graduated from Radcliffe College, gave a lecture in the main auditorium.

J.T. Stinson, a well-regarded fruit specialist, introduced the phrase, "An apple a day keeps the doctor away" (at a lecture during the exhibition).

The famous French organist Alexandre Guilmant played a series of 40 recitals, from memory, on the great organ in Festival Hall, then the largest pipe organ in the world.

Geronimo, the famous former war chief of the Apache, was "on display" in a teepee in the Ethnology Exhibit.

Henri Poincaré gave a keynote address on mathematical physics, including an outline for what would eventually became known as special relativity.

Jelly Roll Morton did not visit, stating in his later Library of Congress interview and recordings that he expected jazz pianist Tony Jackson would attend and win a jazz piano competition at the Exposition. Morton said he was "quite disgusted" to later learn that Jackson hadn't gone either, and that the competition had been won instead by Alfred Wilson; Morton considered himself a better pianist than Wilson.

The poet T. S. Eliot born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri visited the Igorot Village held in the Philippine Exposition section of the St. Louis World's Fair. Only several months after the closing of the World's Fair, he published a short story entitled "The Man Who Was King" in the school magazine of Smith Academy, St. Louis, Mo. he was attending. Inspired by the ganza dance which the Igorot people presented regularly in the Village and their reaction to civilization, the poet explored the interaction of a white man with an island culture. Interestingly, all this antedates the poet's delving into the anthropological studies during his Harvard graduate years.