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.
Read more about this topic: Louisiana Purchase Exposition
Famous quotes containing the words notable and/or visitors:
“Every notable advance in technique or organization has to be paid for, and in most cases the debit is more or less equivalent to the credit. Except of course when its more than equivalent, as it has been with universal education, for example, or wireless, or these damned aeroplanes. In which case, of course, your progress is a step backwards and downwards.”
—Aldous Huxley (18941963)
“The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animals gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)